Interview Series: Strategic Communication Perspectives in Global Media | Interviewer: Gökhan Çolak
Identity & Representation
How do you navigate and balance the different layers of your professional identity—as a CEO, a crisis communication expert, and a public figure? What key dynamics determine which aspect of your identity comes to the forefront in different contexts?
Balancing the different layers of my professional identity is less about choosing one over the other and more about consciously integrating them while staying anchored in purpose. At the core, my role as a CEO defines my responsibilities: I lead, make strategic decisions, and ensure short and long term impact. This perspective is always present, especially when navigating high stakes situations where business continuity is on the line. My identity as a crisis communication expert comes to the forefront in moments of uncertainty or reputational risk. In those contexts, precision, clarity, and timing become critical. I shift into a mode that prioritizes rapid assessment, stakeholder mapping, and message discipline, ensuring that every word and action supports stability and credibility.
As a public figure, I operate with an awareness that visibility amplifies both influence and accountability. Here, authenticity and consistency are key. It’s not just what I communicate, but how I embody values over time that shapes trust with broader audiences. The dynamic that determines which aspect leads is context: Urgency and risk level activate the crisis expert mindset, strategic direction and leadership decisions call forward the CEO mindset. Visibility and public engagement highlight the public figure and opinion. What ties them all together is a clear internal compass of my values, knowledge, experience, and a deep understanding of responsibility. Rather than seeing these roles as separate, I view them as complementary lenses that allow me to respond with both agility and integrity. Ultimately, the balance comes from being intentional: knowing when to support and empower, when to guide, and when to represent—and ensuring that all three are aligned in service of trust and the most professional service in our industry.
Image & Institutional Authority
How would you theorize the relationship between personal image and institutional authority? In high-visibility roles, how do individual representation and organizational credibility interact?
This relationship is not neutral, it’s a power exchange. In high visibility roles, your personal image doesn’t just reflect the institution, you actively compete with it for trust. The audience is constantly asking: Do I believe the system, or do I believe the person standing in front of me? And in many cases, they decide faster about the person than they ever will about the institution. Institutions don’t speak, people do. And when they do, they compress complexity into something emotionally legible. A single appearance, a single sentence, can either reinforce years of institutional credibility—or unravel it. So the interaction is not passive. It’s volatile.
When alignment is strong, personal image becomes an amplifier. It accelerates trust, humanizes authority, and makes the institution feel coherent and real. But when there’s even a slight gap (between what the institution claims and how the individual behaves) that gap becomes a fracture line. And in today’s environment, fracture lines don’t stay small. They scale instantly.
There’s also a strategic tension most leaders underestimate: the more visible and trusted the individual becomes, the more fragile the institution can become behind them. You can unintentionally centralize credibility in yourself, and that is a hidden risk. Because the moment you step back, the question becomes: Was the authority ever institutional, or was it always personal?
So the task is not to “balance” the two it’s to actively manage the transfer of trust. Sometimes you step forward and embody the institution, especially in moments of crisis, when people need clarity, not structure. But in moments of stability, you have to deliberately step back and let the institution carry the weight. That’s how you build resilience beyond personality. Because ultimately, if your presence is the only thing holding credibility together, you don’t have authority, you have dependency. And dependency is not leadership. It’s a liability.
Crisis Communication Theory
Do you approach crisis communication primarily as a process of perception management, or as the construction and reframing of reality? How can these two dimensions be balanced in practice?
Crisis communication is often framed as a choice: perception management or the construction of reality. I think this is dangerous. Because in a real crisis, perception is reality, at least in its immediate consequences. Markets react to it. Stakeholders make decisions based on it. Reputations rise or collapse because of it. So if you treat perception as something secondary, you’ve already lost control of the situation.
Crisis communication is not just about managing how reality is seen. It is about actively shaping what reality becomes next. Every statement, every silence, every framing choice sets direction. You are not just describing events, you are defining meaning, assigning responsibility, and opening or closing pathways for what happens after. In that sense, crisis communication is an act of leadership, not just messaging.
So the real challenge is how you operate in both dimensions at once, without losing credibility. If you focus only on perception management, you risk manipulation. You might stabilize the surface, but the underlying reality will eventually break through, and when it does, the trust deficit is far worse. If you focus only on “objective reality,” you risk irrelevance. Because »reality« that is not translated, framed, and understood might as well not exist in the public space.
The balance comes from discipline: You align narrative with facts, but you also recognize that facts don’t speak for themselves. You move fast on perception, but you anchor it in verifiable truth. You simplify, but you don’t distort. And most importantly, you understand timing. Early in a crisis, perception leads. People need clarity before they have complete information. Later, reality must catch up, and it must confirm what you signaled at the start. That’s where credibility is either built or destroyed. Because ultimately, crisis communication is not about choosing between perception and reality. It’s about closing the gap between them, fast enough to lead, and honestly enough to be believed.
Transparency & Strategic Boundaries
In moments of crisis, where should the boundary be drawn between transparency and strategic communication? How can organizations balance full disclosure with controlled messaging from both an ethical and operational standpoint?
Transparency is often treated as an absolute virtue in a crisis. It isn’t. Because the real question is not how much you disclose, but whether what you disclose is meaningful, responsible, and timely. Total transparency sounds principled, but in practice, it can be reckless. Incomplete data, unverified details, or prematurely shared information can escalate harm, create confusion, or even compromise legal and operational outcomes. On the other hand, overly controlled messaging, what people instinctively label as “spin”, erodes trust just as quickly. So the boundary is not fixed. It’s strategic, and it’s ethical. Transparency is about truthfulness. Strategic communication is about timing, framing, and impact.
You owe stakeholders the truth. Always. But you do not owe them chaos. In the early stages of a crisis, clarity matters more than completeness. People need to understand what is happening, what it means for them, and what is being done about it. That requires discipline, choosing what to say now, what to confirm later, and what must remain temporarily undisclosed for valid reasons, whether legal, security related, or operational.
The mistake organizations make is thinking that withholding information is the primary risk. It’s not. The real risk is misalignment, when what you say, what you know, and what eventually becomes public don’t match. That’s where trust collapses. Ethically, the line is crossed the moment communication becomes deceptive, when omission turns into manipulation, or when framing distorts responsibility. Strategically, the line is crossed when speed overrides accuracy, or when control overrides credibility. You should communicate early, but you signal uncertainty where it exists. You disclose facts, but you contextualize them so they are not misinterpreted. You protect sensitive information, but you explain why it cannot yet be shared. And most importantly, you treat communication as a sequence, not a single act. Transparency is not a dump of information, it’s a commitment to progressively reveal the truth as it becomes reliable. Because in a crisis, people don’t expect you to know everything immediately. But they do expect that whatever you say is true, and that tomorrow, it won’t contradict what you said today. That consistency, that integrity over time, is where transparency and strategy stop being in tension and start reinforcing each other.
Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
In environments defined by uncertainty and time pressure, what methodological or cognitive framework guides your decision-making process? How do you weigh data, intuition, and experience?
In a crisis, you are never choosing between a good option and a bad one. You are choosing between incomplete versions of risk, with limited time, imperfect data, and very real consequences. So the idea that decisions are purely datadriven is at least partialy a myth. Data is critical, but in a crisis, it is usualy late, partial, or contested. If you wait for full clarity, you are no longer leading, you are reacting.
You must first structure the unknown: You rapidly define what you know, what you don’t know, and what would change your decision if you knew it. That prevents paralysis and sharpens focus. Then anchor in principles, not just information, cause when data is unstable, principles become your decision making infrastructure. What do we protect first: people, reputation, continuity? If that hierarchy is clear, decisions become faster and more consistent. And integrate intuition. Intuition is compressed experience. It’s pattern recognition built over time. But it only works if it’s been trained in real environments, and if you are disciplined enough to question and use it under pressure.
Experience, in that sense, is what allows you to sense signal in noise. It tells you when something is escalating, even before the data fully confirms it. But here’s the critical tension: Data gives you justification, experience gives you orientation and intuition gives you speed. And in a crisis, speed matters, because delay is also a decision, just an unspoken one. So the balance is not equal weighting. It’s dynamic. Early in a crisis, intuition and experience often lead, because you don’t have the luxury of time. As the situation stabilizes, data must take a stronger and primary role, because decisions need to scale, align, and hold up under scrutiny.
But there’s one more layer that is often overlooked: decision visibility. In high stakes environments, it’s not enough to make the right decision, you have to make it understandable. Because if stakeholders cannot follow your reasoning, they won’t trust the outcome. So ultimately: Act before you are fully ready. Ground decisions in principles, not pressure. Continuously update your position as reality becomes clearer. Because in uncertainty, the goal is not perfect decisions. It’s decisions that remain defensible as the truth unfolds.
Rationality vs Intuition in Leadership
How do you position the relationship between rationality and intuition in leadership? Particularly in crisis situations, how should leaders balance analytical thinking with rapid, instinctive decision-making?
We often talk about rationality and intuition as if they are opposites. They’re not. They are two different speeds of thinking, and in leadership, especially in crisis, you need both operating at once. Rationality is structured. It’s analytical, deliberate, evidence based. It gives you defensibility. It allows your decisions to hold under scrutiny, internally, externally, and over time. Intuition, on the other hand, is fast. It’s immediate. It cuts through complexity before it’s fully articulated. And in high pressure situations, that speed is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. Because in a crisis, if you rely only on rationality, you will be too slow. And if you rely only on intuition, you will/could eventually be wrong. So the question is which one leads and when?
Early in a crisis, intuition often moves first. It signals that something is off before the data is complete. It allows you to act while others are still analyzing. But intuition without discipline is dangerous. It needs to be interrogated and pressure tested against facts, challenged by diverse perspectives, and translated into a decision that can be explained, not just felt. That’s where rationality comes in. Rational thinking doesn’t replace intuition, it stabilizes it. It turns instinct into strategy. It ensures that what feels right can also stand up to reality. But here’s the deeper point: intuition is not irrational.
It is pattern recognition built through experience. It is what allows leaders to recognize escalation, reputational risk, or stakeholder reaction before it fully materializes. And that means not all intuition is equal. Untrained intuition is bias. Trained intuition is expertise. So the real responsibility of leadership is to develop intuition that deserves to be trusted, and to build systems that prevent it from going unchecked. Because in the end, the balance is not static. You move fast, but you validate. You trust your instinct, but you make it explainable. You analyze, but you don’t hide behind analysis. And most importantly: you don’t confuse confidence with correctness. Because in crisis leadership, the goal is not to eliminate uncertainty. It’s to make decisions that are fast enough to matter and grounded enough to last.
Power: Structural vs Relational
Do you conceptualize power primarily as a structural position, or as a relational and contextual phenomenon? How does this perspective shape your leadership and communication strategies?
We tend to think of power as something you have. A title. A position. Authority defined by structure. But in practice, especially in crisis, that version of power is often the least reliable. Because structural power gives you permission to decide. It does not guarantee that others will follow. Real power is relational. It exists in how people respond to you, how much they trust you, and whether they are willing to act on your words, especially when the situation is unclear, uncomfortable, or high-risk. And that makes power inherently unstable. You can hold the highest position in an organization, and still lose influence in a moment if credibility fractures. At the same time, someone without formal authority can become highly influential if they are trusted, consistent, reliable and clear when it matters most.
So the challenge is how consciously you manage the gap between the two. Because leadership happens in that gap. Structural power sets the stage, it gives you access, visibility, and formal responsibility. But relational power determines whether your leadership actually works. And communication is the bridge between them. Every message you deliver either strengthens or weakens that bridge. It either reinforces trust, or introduces doubt.
Power is contextual. In a crisis, power shifts quickly. Stakeholders, employees, media, regulators, the publics, can all redefine the landscape in real time. Authority becomes negotiated, not assumed. So leadership is no longer about holding power. It’s about earning it continuously, in every interaction, under pressure, in full visibility.Because in the end, structural power may give you a voice. But relational power determines whether that voice is believed and whether it results in action.
Gender, Perception & Legitimacy
In the context of female leadership, how do you analyze the impact of physical appearance on professional legitimacy? What strategies have you developed to navigate or counter such perceptual biases?
When we talk about leadership, we like to believe it’s evaluated on competence. But it’s filtered (constantly) through perception. And for women in leadership, physical appearance remains one of the most persistent and least acknowledged filters of all. It shapes first impressions. It influences perceived authority. And, whether we like it or not, it still affects how legitimacy is granted, or withheld. The paradox is sharp: If you align too closely with traditional expectations of appearance, you risk being underestimated. If you deviate from them, you risk being judged as less credible, less “appropriate,” or less authoritative. So the margin for interpretation is narrower. And the scrutiny is higher. But here’s where I take a very clear position. The goal is not to escape perception. That’s impossible.
The goal is to strategically control what perception is anchored to. For me, it comes down to:
consistency of presence Over time, people recalibrate what they focus on. If your communication is precise, your decisions are coherent, and your behavior is aligned, attention shifts, from how you look to how you lead and operate.
clarity of voice Ambiguity invites projection. The clearer and more structured your communication, the less space there is for bias to fill in the gaps.
ownership, not avoidance Trying to minimize visibility rarely works, it often reinforces the very bias you’re trying to escape. Instead, I treat visibility as an asset. If you are seen, then be seen on your terms, with intention, coherence, and control over the narrative you project. So the objective is not just to succeed within existing perceptions. It’s to shift them. To expand what (moral) authority and profesionalism looks like. To normalize different expressions of leadership. And to make competence (not conformity) the dominant signal.
Because legitimacy should not be something women have to negotiate through appearance. But until that changes, the reality is this: You don’t ignore perception. You don’t submit to it. You outgrow it by making it irrelevant to the value you deliver.
Digital Media, Truth & Disinformation
How do you assess the erosion of the concept of ‘truth’ in the context of the rapid development of digital media and increasing disinformation, and how is this transformation reshaping the way the tension between ethics and pragmatism is managed in crisis communication?
We often say that truth is under pressure. I think that’s an understatement. What we are actually witnessing is not just the erosion of truth, but its fragmentation. Digital media hasn’t simply accelerated information. It has multiplied realities. Today, the question is no longer “What is true?”It’s “Which version of the truth gains traction and why?” Because in a hyper connected environment, visibility is no longer tied to accuracy. It’s tied to speed, emotion, and amplification. And that changes the rules fundamentally. Disinformation doesn’t win because it’s credible. It wins because it’s fast, simple, and emotionally compelling, which puts crisis communication in a very uncomfortable position. Because traditionally, ethics and pragmatism were seen as complementary: You tell the truth and you communicate it effectively. Today, that alignment is under strain. If you move too slowly in the name of accuracy, you lose the narrative. If you move too fast in the name of control, you risk compromising truth. So the tension is no longer theoretical. It’s operational: minute by minute, decision by decision.
The critical shift is that crisis communication is no longer just about delivering truth. It’s about making truth competitive. That means understanding the mechanics of attention, amplification, and belief, without surrendering to them. It means framing facts not only correctly but also resonantly. Because facts that don’t travel might as well not exist in the public space, but this is where the ethical line becomes sharper, not weaker. Because the temptation is real, to simplify too much, to over frame, to push narratives that win attention but stretch reality. And the moment you do that, you enter the same logic as disinformation, just with better intentions. That’s the trap. So the question becomes: how do you remain effective without becoming compromised? The answer is high discipline: Competing on clarity, not distortion. Competing on speed, but not at the expense of truth. Competing on relevance by connecting facts to what people actually care about.
And you must accept something difficult: You will not win every narrative battle. But if you lose credibility, you lose everything. Because in an environment where truth is contested, credibility becomes the last stable currency. And credibility is not built in the moment of crisis. It is built before and tested during. So this transformation is not just technological. It is deeply ethical. It forces leaders to decide, under pressure and in full visibility: Do you optimize for attention? Or do you anchor in integrity and find ways to make it visible? Because in the end, crisis communication is no longer just about protecting reputation. It’s about defending the conditions under which truth can still matter. And that is no longer just a professional responsibility. It’s a leadership one.
Future of Crisis Communication
How would you conceptualize the interplay between power, communication, and trust within a unified theoretical framework? From this perspective, what structural directions do you see for the future evolution of crisis communication, and what fundamental principle could be formulated to contribute to the academic literature?
From an analytical perspective, the interplay between power, communication, and trust can be conceptualized as a triadic, co/constitutive system, in which each element is conditioned by the others. Power, in this framework, is not treated solely as a structural attribute (position, hierarchy, institutional authority), but as a relational capacity to shape meaning and coordinate action under conditions of uncertainty. Communication functions as the operational mechanism through which this capacity is exercised, it is the medium that translates authority into influence. Trust, in turn, operates as the legitimizing currency of the system: it determines whether communicated meaning is accepted, contested, or rejected by relevant stakeholders.
Crucially, this relationship is dynamic rather than linear. Communication does not simply transmit power; it actively produces and redistributes it, while trust serves both as an outcome of prior interactions and as a precondition for future effectiveness. In this sense, trust can be understood as a form of deferred validation, a temporally extended evaluation of consistency between communicated claims and observable reality. Within crisis contexts, this triadic relationship becomes particularly visible and accelerated. Crises function as stress tests of systemic coherence, exposing misalignments between institutional claims (power), communicative practices, and stakeholder expectations (trust). When communication fails to align with either the realities of the situation or the perceived legitimacy of authority, trust deteriorates, and with it, the effective capacity to exercise power.
Building on this, we can conceptualize crisis communication as a process of dynamic alignment across three dimensions:
Epistemic alignment: the degree to which communication corresponds to verifiable reality (truth conditions).
Relational alignment: the degree to which communication resonates with stakeholder expectations, values, and perceptions (trust conditions).
Institutional alignment: the degree to which communication reflects and reinforces legitimate authority structures (power conditions).
Effective crisis communication occurs at the intersection of these three axes. Misalignment in any one dimension (factually correct but socially tone deaf communication, or strategically persuasive but factually weak messaging) produces instability in the overall system. From this theoretical standpoint, several structural shifts are likely to shape the future evolution of crisis communication:
From centralized authority to distributed credibility Digital media environments decentralize the production and validation of information. Authority is no longer monopolized by institutions but is continuously negotiated across networks. This implies a shift from control based to coordination based communication models.
From information asymmetry to transparency ecosystems The declining feasibility of information control necessitates a move toward structured transparency. where organizations design communication as an ongoing, staged process rather than episodic disclosure.
From message delivery to meaning competition Crisis communication increasingly operates within environments of competing narratives. The task is not only to provide accurate information but to ensure that it achieves interpretive dominance without compromising epistemic integrity.
From reactive to anticipatory communication systems The integration of data analytics, real-time monitoring, and scenario planning will shift crisis communication toward pre-emptive framing, where potential crises are partially shaped before they fully materialize.
The effectiveness of crisis communication is determined by the continuous alignment between communicated representations of reality, the relational expectations of stakeholders, and the perceived legitimacy of authority. Sustainable influence emerges not from the control of information, but from the capacity to maintain coherence across these dimensions over time. This principle emphasizes that credibility is neither static nor unidimensional. It is dynamically produced through the interaction of truth, perception, and authority, and can only be sustained through their ongoing alignment.
In this sense, the future of crisis communication lies not in refining isolated techniques, but in developing integrated systems of meaning management, where power, communication, and trust are understood as mutually constitutive elements of a single, evolving “structure”.
Your work challenges the dominance of vision within Western epistemology. How does a sonic epistemology reconfigure our understanding of knowledge production in cinema?
Visual epistemology is an epistemology of autonomous bodies and events. These are thus measurable, classifiable and nameable. The visual relies on the separating function of the gaze, to see the thing before seeing its contexts and relationships which appear in a secondary viewing or measuring. Its knowledge system reflects this priority. And even when it seeks a knowledge of connection, this connection is understood as a measurable connection of two normally separate bodies. In sound this state of separation is impossible. Everything sounds together. Sonic knowledge is thus not the knowledge of a thing or body. Instead, it is the knowledge of relationships and relationalities. And instead of bringing separate items into contact, sound manifests as indivisibility: there is no sound alone, the tone or the phoneme are constructs of a visual, musical and linguistic system. Sound is everything at once, it is the contact, it is how we relate rather than me or you. Therefore, to know what we perceive to be a thing we need to listen to how it sounds with other bodies and more than human bodies to sense what it is contingently. Steven Feld called this sonic epistemology an acoustemology, bringing together the notion of acoustics and epistemology. He was influenced in this naming by the Kaluli people in the Papua New Guinea rain forest where he did his field work in the 1970s and where he abandoned his visual anthropology and ethnographic methodology that named and classified separate object and events to engage in the all together. Because the sensory density of the rainforest did not allow a discrete view. There you cannot see the tree from the trees, but you have to listen to everything together with everything else to come to know from the together and that together includes you the listener. This articulates an acoustic epistemology that we could engage outside the rainforest too. To hear the world from its indivisibility and appreciate the knowledge that the dense simultaneity of sounds provides about contingent relationship rather than concrete objects.
Having said all of this, I believe we could see from sound the contingent relationality of the world. What stops us seeing relationally is not the eye as a physiological apparatus, but the entrainment in a cultural visuality that is ideologised by the notion of ownership, extraction, grasping and comprehending the world, rather than knowing with it also ourselves.
Caption: courtesy chaosmagicmusic, Cologne 2023, Kai Niggemann
Ontology of Sound
You argue that sound does not represent the world but produces its own reality. Could you elaborate on the ontological status of sound in relation to the audiovisual image?
I do not actually say it quite like this. What I suggest is that, given the sonic makes a relational world of many encounters, and sounds its indivisible reality, as described in response to your last question, what sound reveals is that the singularity of the world is an illusion. Instead, sound makes accessible as in thinkable the relational plurality of the world. There is not one actual world, that is verifiably true for all of us. Instead, the real world exists in plural slices some of which we find more actual than others, others remain possible only and others appear even impossible, but that does not mean they are not actual. This world thus exists as many possible worlds from which we negotiate in contingent moments of encounter, a temporary actual world. A shared life-world.
The world that I live is actual for me but only possible for you. However, the sonic possible worlds I talk about are not irrealities or literary fictions, parallel worlds easily subsumed into a greater, unified real actuality. Instead, they are the plurality of this world that questions the singular appearance of what we might term actual, even though we are not verifiably sure that we agree on this actuality. Because the possibilities of this world questions the value and norms of the actual. Their invisible plurality reveals them as an arbitrary and ideological selection and a construct, and not the only real.
Rethinking “Added Value”
Michel Chion’s concept of “added value” suggests that sound enriches the image. Do you see this as a limitation, in the sense that it still subordinates sound to the visual?
Michel Chion is a structuralist for whom the world and by extension film is a text, a semantic system. It is thus readable and knowable on the terms of its signifying structure. His theories unfold within film as such a cultural text to be read and interpreted. Thus when he says sound is “added value” he refers to how in film sound represents added value to the visual, without questioning the separation and consequent hierarchy between visual and sonic film track thus assumed. The film industry is very visually oriented. The visual makes the “pictures”. The sound can contribute to those pictures, adding layers of storytelling and affect, but it is not, within the privilege of the visual, the driving force or the orienting sensorium.
Therefore, when I disagree with him on the notion of added value, I disagree on two counts: one that film is visual and sound can add value to that visual a priori. As instead I understand film to be multi-material and multisensory and the question has to be about producing sense from a complex multisensoriality, not about adding value to a visual thing. Secondly, I disagree with his use of terminology because the sonic is not a thing added post-production, to add value to the primary of the visual. Instead, the sonic is there at the moment of writing the screenplay, on location scouting, in rehearsals, on set, etc. I know it is the reality of much film production that the sound is not part of the pre-production discussions. It is something apparently “added”, sometimes as Foley, sometimes as ADR after the event. And even if it is recorded on location it is added to the film track not as a sound track. But this is Hollywood inspired filmmaking that is a picture book film making of stories on celluloid. There is another kind of filmmaking that understands the indivisibility of the audio-visual, that is a materialist film making that does not add sound to film but understand how their indivisibility produces a scene. And conversely the film critique engaged in that multi-sensory world cannot speak about adding value to a visual track but must contemplate the simultaneity of all tracks, even the absent ones. So nothing gets added because nothing is apart.
Photo: BBC Radio 3 – Late Junction, Max Reinhardt with Salome Voegelin
Phenomenology and Embodiment
Your approach often intersects with phenomenology. How does listening as an embodied experience reshape the spectator’s relation to cinematic space and time?
Again, we need to be particular as to what sort of film-making we mean and what sort of spectator we mean. If my expectation of film is narrative clarity, storytelling in a semantic way, it is probably not desirable for the viewer to propose they should listen to the sound track to sense their being in the film as a being in the world of the film and the film becoming the film through that intersubjective and reciprocal experience. Phenomenology, unlike structuralism, engages perception as a reciprocal process of being in the world which becomes the world it is for us through our being in it. It performs a reduction, an époché, in order to understand this experience rather than an a priori object or event. Phenomenology brackets the apparently known, to get to the experience at that moment. It does not read the world or film, from a pre-existing vocabulary or signifying system, but engages in the experience as a particular vis-à-vis constituted in our being with. Viewing thus becomes a ‘sensory-motor action,’ a doing perception also of sound that generates rather than perceives what it sees, hears and senses. Consequently, given that this sensory motor action of a listening-viewing generates the world of the film, our engagement demands responsibility and care. I am responsible for how I listen and what I hear, and also for what I do not hear. These sensory motor engagements with the world generate my life-world, my sensory world that I understand myself with. I am responsible for this world/ film world I generate from my being in the world/film world.
In this phenomenological understanding of the world as constituted in sensory-motor actions as life-worlds and the understanding of the film world as such a life-world, there is no distance that enables reading. The suspense of filmic reality is not a theoretical but an actual suspense, an époché, that allows us to see things differently and thus to engage in the experiential reality of the film as a reciprocal and responsible world.
Photo: Salomé Voegelin – University of the Arts London
Silence and the Sonic Negative
Within your framework, how can silence be theorized beyond absence— _as a productive, material, and even disruptive sonic condition?
Silence is not the absence of sound but the beginning of listening. I wrote something like this over 15 years ago in my first book Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. To me this has only become more pertinent, particularly in relation to politics and what we cannot or do not want to hear and how to start hearing it. It is important to note that silence and noise are not binaries. Instead, they are on a perceptual spectrum, where they’re not in opposition to each other, but highlight extremes that are part of all sounds when they are listened to beyond a referent or name, in the contingency of the relationship that sounds. All sounds can be noisy and all sounds can be silent. And silence can engender disruption and as much as noise can calm things down. Silence can disrupt the flow of the usual, what we think we hear, and how we hear it. It can create uncertainty and fear as we lose the baseline of the signal path.
We talk about noise in relation to noise-signal ratio and how noise disrupts what we can hear, as in understand and make sense of, turning it illegible, and how in this way noise is the undesirable sound of telecommunication, science and writing. However, silence can equally be heard as “no signal”. Its undesirability is not loud, and thus it is not even noticed. It does not impede the signal but holds the signal in the thick ambience of what we do not know to hear or listen out for. It sounds the conceit of a clear signal by sounding the condition of the unheard, and the excluded. Once we tune into silence, once we become aware of its potential to make us hear differently, more and otherwise, then we can start to hear the silent hum that is the no signal of a different speech. And that is why I think the notion that silence is the beginning of listening remains and gains in relevance. Because at this political conjuncture we need to hear also what you hint at by the term Negative: that which seems upside down and strange but holds the imagination of a different world, which in the process of photographic development gets rendered into the shapes and forms we recognise.
Subjectivity and the Unconscious
If sound engages the listener on a pre-reflective or unconscious level, how does this affect the construction of subjectivity in film experience?
I do not think sound engages the listener in a pre-reflective level but demands of us that we not only suspend our disbelief in relation to the veracity or feasibility of the narrative, but that we suspend the reality of the filmic apparatus, its visual organisation and distance, so we might come to understand film as a reciprocal and intersubjective life-world and appreciate our responsibility for what we see and hear. This presumes an ethical listening and an ethical subjectivity that is aware of their participation in the heard and also in the silent, the unheard and ignored. To still use the prefix pre-, I would say that this listening with responsibility and a participatory ethics, understanding one’s role in generating the heard and also what remains inaudible, engages in the ‘preliminary’ rather than the ‘pre-reflective’. I am thinking this term with Hannah Arendt who in her 1954 text ‘Understanding and Politics’ suggests that we have lost the ability to make sense of the new because we rely on the familiar to grasp what is entirely unfamiliar – what cannot be understood within the rules of common sense and the ‘normal’ by which we tend to measure and recognise the real, and to which we thus reduce it. In particular, she addresses the failure to understand totalitarianism, by confusing it with imperialism because of reading it through old signifiers which prevent us from seeing its own particular and new evil. This renders us unable to pursue appropriate political actions in resistance and to develop a relevant political subjectivity. In response she suggests an emphasis on the preliminary, the not yet named, where a word first appears as a new word and a new sound, and where its newness can be understood. In its preliminary articulation – before it has been folded into existing categories and meanings. Film that engages enables this preliminary, that does not seek to tell the actual from its past representation but allows us to experience the possible on its current terms, can encourage a sense of the preliminary. I suggest sound can enable the imagination of the preliminary, as it does not close itself off in representation but invites an uncertain listening. And from this listening in a preliminary mode, that is as a sensory-motor action which generates the heard in its unfamiliar newness, a new understanding can be reached and a relevant (political) subjectivity imagined.
Salomé Voegelin – 4th Council of Europe Platform Exchange on Culture and Digitisation, Photo: ZKM
The Political Dimension of Listening
Can listening be understood as a site of resistance? How might sonic practices destabilize dominant regimes of visibility and representation?
Listening in a sense that it is a sensory-motor action, a movement forward from listening into action, is always already engaged in action and thus also in the possibility to refuse or reject an action. I am invested in thinking listening as a paradigm shift; to shift a conventional scopic regime and its focus on things, towards an acceptance and practice of the indivisibility of this world. This in itself represents a rejection of the dominant visual regime which starts from the separate and the discrete, and pursues to measure, name and classify it before bringing it into context and relationality. And thus keeping it always still apart. This rejection is not a not looking, instead it means to practice listening to film work and the world, to appreciate its multisensory indivisibility, and turning the visual sense on its head. What we are left with is how things are by being together and in contingent encounters. This requires a new sense of thinking the world, and ourselves in this world, which naturally destabilizes how we look and what we see. This implies new values and a new understanding and a new imaginary so radical and different that it will never happen. This does not mean we should not pursue it however. Since indivisibility also means reciprocity and demands responsibility, creating an awareness for interdependence, which are all competencies and sensibilities which we need to understand and live with this complexly interwoven and interdependent world and its various political, economic, ecological and social crises.
Your work operates at the intersection of philosophy, sound art, and media theory. What methodological shifts are necessary for film studies to fully integrate sound as a primary analytical category?
I think there are wonderful films that practice great awareness of the sonic as a concept and materiality and that produce fantastic sound tracks that enable a little what I mention above: the appreciation of the film as a multi-sensory possible world that invites the understanding of the plurality of filmworlds generated. The problem, or rather the emphasis and priority of the visual is strong and maybe unsurmountable. The technology, the way a film set operates is clearly driven from the image. Therefore, on the one hand, to undertake such a methodological shift into a sonic film theory, we would have to reset the film set, rethink how we make films, how we act, direct, edit and track lay. And then we would have to have training for listening to film, to generate a sonic sensibility and come to understand how film generates the plural slices of its indivisible world rather than proposing the meeting of the discreet, the story, the character, the action.
In a sense, and referring to an earlier answer to one of your questions, we would need training to listen to the film’s preliminary experience, conjured in sound, and we would need courage and desire not to fold it always already into history and the familiar but to follow the uncertainty, the perpetual present of sound into the film’s unfamiliar materiality. To start to see film from its sound and thus from its indivisibility of which we are part. To become sonic subjects, human bodies with other human and more-than-human bodies, in a close relationality and responsibility, and write from there. This would not hinder criticality. A criticism often levied against sound for its lack of critical distance when it is not treated in a structuralist scheme. Instead, a sound theory of film could develop a more relevant and pressing criticality, of lived and heard relationships of a vibrational film practice. It could work from the motor-sensory-action of listening relationally and reciprocally, understood as an effort of generating rather than viewing the film. Thus, we would become vibrational bodies and write theory from our entanglement in the vibrational sphere of film. Always aware of the vulnerability and responsibility of the viewer as listener to what they see and hear and what finally they write about. The task would be to theorise from that entangled position understanding its responsibility and understanding that thus the rigour of this criticism would be legitimised by the body of the critique rather than canons and pre-existing contexts of how film is written about.
Photo: Texts + Talks | Salomé Voegelin
Technology and Artificial Sound
With the increasing presence of synthetic and AI-generated sound, how might we rethink authenticity, presence, and materiality in sonic experience?
This is a huge question and I am not sure it is answerable, or that I can answer it truly at this stage. The problems with AI for sound tracks as I see them at this moment, are very similar to the problems of AI in literature or philosophical or any writing. AI does not think in terms of relationship, it does not understand its indivisibility, and contextualisation. It only recognises patterns and frequencies. In that sense it is a scopic tool. And in its quest for the most frequent it erases that which is not often sounded, the marginal, the excluded and discriminated against, and amplifies the most prevalent. In this way it speeds up a hyper-hegemonisation of the visual regime and pursues a data standardisation of its materiality and sense. Thus it erases difference, diversity and plurality and it erases the body as a site of multi-sensory response: In the end we will only have a hand full of sounds and a handful of words, and the body has gone. AI is the great depletion machine. It does not so much make us rethink authenticity and reality but erases our thinking altogether. We will be confronted with frequency presence whose authenticity has nothing to do with experience and relationships but only with numbers and how often they might appear. AI authenticity is probability and speed. This fits quite well incidentally with the hype of future betting’s markets, markets for trading the future by guessing what somebody might say or do and how often or when. This form of betting on a probable incident rather than on analytical predications accelerates the status of the stock market as casino, and appears to represent AI’s total realisation of the world in frequency terms. This is of course the very opposite of what I hope for with a paradigm shift towards sonic indivisibility, complexity and responsibility. As instead, we are moving with great speed and zero responsibility towards the erasure of an experiential world by numbers and words as numbers. As sound designers and sound artists as well as critically listening viewers, we must ask ourselves at what cost and for what benefit do we want to work with AI?
On the other hand or at the same time sound and a sonic thinking might reveal themselves as the perfect resistance tools against an AI frequency world. And my desired for paradigm shift will happen due to necessity to keep our bodies to keep our lives.
Conceptual Closing
If cinema were to be theorized primarily through listening rather than vision, what would be the most significant conceptual shift for film theory?
To write about film not as interpretation of scenes, and dialogue, and moments and plots but as indivisible materiality that thinks in connecting rather than things by themselves and that creates sonic possible worlds: the plural slices of this world and of the film world, would mean to write about everything at the same time. I am not sure we can write that way. It would be a challenge. But we surely should try so we could develop a cultural visuality from our ears, able to understand the vibrational, indivisible and relational experience of film and sense ourselves within it.
Interview Series: Interviews with Curators, Artists and Cultural Thinkers | Interview: Gökhan Çolak
Visual Storytelling and Interdisciplinary Research
Your work brings together documentary cinema, cultural research, and visual storytelling. In your view, how does film production function as a field of inquiry for reflecting on contemporary art and cultural production?
Film has always been my way of thinking through ideas. That’s where my deep thinking happens, while I translate complexity to engaging storytelling. When I make a documentary, the process of research, of sitting with a subject for months or years, of finding the visual language to hold a complex idea, that is itself a form of inquiry. With “Radical Landscapes,” for example, I spent 10 years inside the archive of the 9999 group, my father’s radical architecture collective from late 1960s Florence. The film became a way to ask questions about utopia, about the relationship between art and politics, about what gets remembered and what gets erased, about life and death. Documentary cinema documents while offering new knowledge. It creates a space where cultural production can be examined, questioned, and felt, all at once.
In your documentary projects, you often focus on themes related to art, architecture, and cultural heritage. How does this interdisciplinary approach shape your creative process?
I’ve never been able to stay inside one discipline, and honestly I think that’s where the most interesting work happens. My background spans journalism, documentary, digital media, architecture (through my family), and now AI filmmaking. Each of these fields has its own way of seeing, its own rigor. When I approach a project about cultural heritage, I’m thinking like a researcher and a filmmaker simultaneously. The architecture informs the framing. The journalistic instinct pushes me to ask harder questions. The artistic impulse gives me permission to be poetic. This layering is central to how I work. A project like the 9999 Archive research required me to be an archivist, a daughter, a historian, and a visual storyteller all at once. Those roles inform and deepen each other.
Archive, Memory, and Cultural Heritage
In several of your projects, you engage with archives and historical materials, reinterpreting visual and cultural memory. What does working with archives mean to you as a process of research and discovery?
Archives are alive. That’s the first thing people misunderstand. They think of archives as static, settled, dusty. But when you enter an archive, especially one you have a personal connection to, you’re entering a conversation with time. I am the custodian of the 9999 Archive, the collection of work left by my late father and his collaborators in the Florentine radical architecture movement. Working with that material has been one of the most profound creative experiences of my life. You find things you didn’t expect. You discover connections the original creators may not have seen. You hold a sketch from 1971 and suddenly understand something about the present. For me, archival work is a form of listening. And the act of reinterpreting that material through film, through exhibitions, through new technologies, is how we keep cultural memory honest and dynamic rather than frozen. The coolest thing? A million stories told in a million ways can stem from the same archive.
Digital Transformation and New Media
Today, visual culture and storytelling are increasingly shaped by digital tools and new media technologies. How do you think this transformation is influencing artistic production and forms of visual narration?
We’re living through a fundamental shift in who gets to tell stories and how. Digital and AI tools have democratized production in ways that would have been unimaginable when I started in journalism and documentary. But what interests me most right now is the emergence of AI as a creative medium. I work as a Creative Partner with platforms like Seedance, Runway, Sora, Leonardo, Pika, InVideo, CapCut, and ElevenLabs, and I’ve been making AI films since early in this wave back in 2022. What I see happening is that the tools are changing the grammar of visual storytelling. You can now create imagery that sits between photography and painting, between documentary and dream. The transformation is both technical and conceptual. It’s in how we think as much as in how we make and what we produce. It’s forcing us to rethink what an image is, what authorship means, what “real” looks like. For visual culture, that’s enormously exciting and also demands real critical thinking.
Artificial Intelligence and Creative Production
In recent years, you have also explored AI-assisted visual production and cinema. How do you evaluate the creative possibilities that artificial intelligence offers for filmmaking and visual culture?
AI has given me a new language. My upcoming film “Alma Robot,” which won four international awards, is a hybrid work that used AI-generated imagery alongside live footage I shot in Patagonia under Paolo Sorrentino’s mentorship. What AI allows me to do is visualize the interior, the emotional, the abstract, in ways that traditional cinematography can’t always reach. I can give form to memory, to grief, to transformation. The films that matter are still driven by a point of view, by craft, by something the filmmaker needs to say: the message. I teach AI filmmaking at Franklin University Switzerland and in workshops internationally, and the first thing I tell my students is that the technology is only as interesting as the person using it. That’s why I focus a lot on students understanding the importance of their Voice. The creative possibilities are extraordinary, but they require the same rigor and intentionality as any other form of cinema.
Creative Practice Between Past and Future
Your work often combines historical research with experimental production using new technologies. How do you establish a balance between exploring cultural heritage and experimenting with emerging technologies?
For me, there’s no tension between research and new tech. In fact, they need each other. The radical architects of 1960s Florence were themselves technologists and dreamers. They used the tools of their time, Super 8 film, performance, inflatable structures, to imagine different futures…while they explored the topic of human vs tech in the actual artwork. When I use AI to reinterpret or extend their work, I’m continuing that same impulse. The 9999 group believed art should be experimental, interdisciplinary, and forward-looking. Working with their archive through contemporary technology feels like honoring their philosophy. Heritage gives you roots. Technology gives you reach. The balance comes from never letting one override the other. You stay grounded in research, in history, in genuine understanding of the material. And then you let the new tools open doors you couldn’t have opened before.
Cinema, Exhibitions, and Art Institutions
Some of your films are presented not only in cinematic contexts but also within museums and art institutions. How do you see the relationship between cinema and contemporary art institutions evolving?
The boundaries have been dissolving for years, and I think that’s a good thing. My work has been shown in film festivals and in art contexts, and each space brings out something different in the same piece. Cinema in a theater is a temporal experience; you surrender to the filmmaker’s rhythm. In a gallery or museum, the viewer has more autonomy, more time, more space to circle back. What I find most interesting is how AI cinema is accelerating this convergence. AI-generated films often have a painterly, textural quality, a feeling of time-suspended that feels very much at home in exhibition spaces. And the questions they raise about authorship, about the nature of images, about technology and humanity, are questions that contemporary art institutions are uniquely equipped to hold. I think and hope we’ll see more and more filmmakers working across both worlds, and that the distinction between “cinema” and “art” will matter less than the quality of the thinking.
Aesthetics and Narrative Construction
When constructing a visual narrative, which aesthetic or intellectual approaches influence your storytelling?
I come from a very specific visual lineage. Growing up Florentine, surrounded by Renaissance architecture and the radical experiments of my father’s generation, and the Florence Film Festival my parents founded and ran, as well as their later subtitling company they started from our home, gave me a deep sense that beauty and ideas are inseparable. My aesthetic is grounded in composition, in light, in the emotional weight of an image and its meaning. Intellectually, I’m drawn to the space between the personal and the political, the intimate and the historical. I think a lot about Walter Benjamin’s idea of the “dialectical image,” the way a single visual moment can hold past and present in tension. I also carry my journalism training with me. There’s a commitment to truth, to specificity, to earning every claim you make. Even in my most experimental AI work, I’m always asking: what is this image doing? What does it mean? Is it honest? I love the editing process because of this final decision making.
The New Generation of Creators
As both a filmmaker and educator, you work with younger generations of creatives. What do you see as the main opportunities and challenges that young artists and filmmakers face in the digital age?
The opportunity is extraordinary. The tools available today mean that a student with a laptop can create work that would have required a full production crew ten years ago. In my university classes at Franklin University Switzerland or teenagers at Locarno Film Festival, I watch students go from first concept to finished AI film in a matter of days or weeks. The creative barrier to entry has never been lower. But that’s also the challenge. When everyone can make something, the question becomes: do you have something to say? The risk of the AI era is a flood of technically impressive but emotionally empty work. What I try to give my students is a framework for thinking, for developing a point of view, for understanding why they’re making something before they figure out how. The other challenge is critical literacy. Young creators need to understand these tools deeply enough to use them with intention. Many stem from the Covid era and grew up on socials and screens so the curiosity, engagement with others and hunger to learn is something very delicate to see in them. The ones who combine technical fluency with voice, confidence, sensitivity and genuine artistic vision are going to do remarkable things.
The Future of Visual Culture
Finally, considering the evolving relationship between contemporary art, cinema, and technology, how do you envision the future of visual storytelling in the coming years?
I think we’re heading toward a moment where the categories we’ve relied on, film, art, design, technology, will feel increasingly inadequate. So will the vocabulary to understand, discuss and argue about it all. The most compelling work is already happening in the spaces between disciplines. AI cinema is one example. The 9999 Archive work is another: a project that is simultaneously historical research, family memoir, and experimental media. What excites me is that the next generation of creators won’t have to choose between being a filmmaker or an artist or a technologist. They can be all of those things at once, the way the radical architects of the 1960s were simultaneously designers, architects, philosophers, performers, and provocateurs. They said, “The most important project was the project of our life.” The future of visual culture belongs to people who can think across boundaries, who understand both the weight of history and the possibilities of new tools, and who have something urgent and human to say. That’s what I’m working toward, in my films, in my teaching, and in everything Fiumi Studios does.
Interview Series: The Transformation of Public Relations in the Digital Age | Interviewer: Gökhan Çolak
The Academic Development of Public Relations
Public relations was long perceived primarily as a practice-oriented profession. However, your work played a significant role in establishing it as a theoretical and academic field. In your view, what were the most critical turning points in the academic development of public relations?
This is a fascinating question, but it also would require the writing of a book or, at least, a journal article to answer it adequately. Fortunately, I coauthored an article in 2023 that addressed this question in detail.1 1 I must point out, however, that the article exclusively addressed the academic development of public relations in the United States. Other regions and countries may have experienced a different academic development of the discipline. The United States generally has been credited with leading the public relations discipline, but some scholars in other countries have challenged that assumption.
The article to which I am referring was published as part of a special issue of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly that celebrated 100 years of publication of the journal. JMCQ is the premier journal of the (U.S) Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. In the United States, public relations was taught first in schools of journalism and mass communication, although it now is taught equally in departments of communication and, occasionally, in other academic departments. My program at the University of Maryland, for example, was housed in the College of Journalism until it was moved to the Department of Communication in 2005. The special issue contained 22 articles reviewing articles published in JMCQ over its first 100 years for specialized areas such as journalism, mass communication, advertising, and (in my case) public relations. I am proud to say that the first author of the article was my grandson, James Hollenczer, who at the time was a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma.
I will quote directly from this article, but first I would like to provide a general overview of the history of public relations education in the United States. The first courses in public relations generally were offered at the time of World War I in schools of journalism and generally were taught by the public information officers of the university or by local practitioners. It wasn’t until the 1950s and 1960s that schools of journalism (and sometimes) mass communication employed full-time public relations educators. Most were former practitioners who did not hold an advanced degree. Exceptions were Scott Cutlip of the University of Wisconsin and Otto Lerbinger and Edward J. Robinson of Boston University. They used research from disciplines such as psychology, sociology, mass communication, and political science in textbooks that they authored. Theories of persuasion and public opinion were prominent, and the emphasis was on messaging and persuasion to influence public opinion and behavior. In the 1960s, I was among a few young scholars who developed specialized theories of public relations. Glen Broom and I, who were in that group, were both Ph.D. students at the University of Wisconsin at the time—where we were influenced by Cutlip. My first theory was the situational theory of publics, which focused on the public side of public relations rather than the organization side. Broom originally focused on coorientation theory, which was a forerunner of current theories of organization-public relationships. Later, in collaboration with David Dozier, a Ph.D. student at Stanford University, Broom developed a theory of managerial and technical roles. At about the same time, I introduced the models of public relations, and both roles and models became components of Excellence theory. Robert Heath, who was educated at the University of Illinois and was another prominent scholar at the time, applied principles of rhetoric to public relations.
In the late 1990s and the turn of the century, rhetorical and critical scholars (often in Europe and outside the United States), challenged our approach, which I believe used theory and research to professionalize the practice of public relations. They argued that public relations was mostly a means for organizations to exercise their power over publics. Recently, many have insisted that public relations theory and research should turn away from organizations and focus on empowering publics. I generally disagree with the critical argument that my theories and similar ones are exclusively means to benefit organizations. I began my research career by focusing on publics with my situational theory. The purpose of both the symmetrical model and the Excellence theory was on developing the profession of public relations in a way that would benefit both organizations and publics.
The article in JMCQ used Thomas Kuhn’s historical theory of the stages of development of a scientific discipline to describe the 100 years of public relations scholarship. The following quote provides a conclusion to my answer to this question:
This article discusses the evolution of public relations from its pre-science period to the present day, according to Kuhn’s classic model. In the early days, public relations was focused on systematic efforts to influence public opinion, but scholars began to doubt the accuracy of this approach by the 1950s. In the 1960s, the field faced conceptual challenges and was stagnant in its pre-theoretical formula, but in the 1970s, researchers began to conceptualize people as active communicators with motives and interests. The 1980s and 1990s saw a focus on understanding the different models of public relations, and in the 21st century, the field shifted toward a multifunctional definition of public relations, with a focus on relationship theories, ethics, public behavior, and technology. . .
At a qualitative level, the fundamentals of the discipline have undergone a “revolutionary” development that can be traced over a century, leading public relations scholars and professionals to rethink themselves and revise their disciplinary culture. In the pre-theoretical stage, public relations was mostly reduced to the mechanistic dimension of “influence” and “propaganda.” This produced an asymmetrical search for visibility and persuasion in which organizations sought to impose themselves and their own private scopes over an abstract idea of “public opinion.” Then, in the second half of the 20th century and along with the development of the mass media system, some decisive challenges enlarged the traditional vision of public relations: the reconceptualization of “receivers” in terms of “active communicators” and the segmentation of an undifferentiated “environment” into specific categories of stakeholders and strategic “publics.”
Indeed, the historical evolution of the discipline in the context of JMCQ suggests that, in a hyper-mediated and post-pandemic world, public relations is reaching a mature stage of development. A model shift at the theoretical level, as the one mentioned, encourages the idea that public relations is a resource not only for corporate leaders and organizations generally, but also anyone interested in the study of group behavior. (pp. 948-949)
The Four Models of Public Relations
Your four models of public relations remain among the most influential conceptual frameworks in the discipline. Considering the current digital media environment, do you believe these models still retain their explanatory power?
My first research in the 1960s was on the behavior of publics, which I believed had been ignored in public relations research. I began this research in my Ph.D. dissertation, which was on communication and agricultural development in Colombia. In the dissertation, I studied large landowners (latifundistas), and I followed this with a similar study of peasant farmers (minifundistas). I returned to the United States after two years in Colombia believing that organizations were more often responsible for a lack of economic development than were publics. Thus, I began a period of about 15 years of research on the public relations (communication) behavior of organizations, while also continuing my research on publics.
To explain my development of the models, it is helpful to understand that researchers generally look for two sets of characteristics (variables) to explain something they are interested in: independent and dependent variables. The dependent variables are the characteristics we want to explain (such as public relations behavior), and the independent variables are the characteristics that explain or sometimes predict when the dependent variables occur. I tried several dependent variables to describe public relations behavior and eventually settled on the four models as a good description of how public relations professionals behave. I also tried several independent variables to explain why PR departments practice different models—such as the nature of an organization’s environment, the type of technology used in an organization, the hierarchical structure of the organization, and the power of the public relations department. Eventually, I found that the education and knowledge of PR people and the beliefs of organizational leaders of what public relations is and does best explained which model was practiced. In addition, our research showed that organizations that practiced the two-way symmetrical model were more successful, socially responsible, and ethical than those who practiced other models.
After many studies of these models, my colleagues and I concluded that they were useful descriptions of different types of public relations behavior, although they probably were overly simple. In addition, we found that organizations often use more than one of the models at the same time and use different models for different communication programs (such as media relations, community relations, or marketing communication.) In the Excellence study, we identified four dimensions that lie beneath the models: symmetrical vs. asymmetrical, one way vs. two-way, mediated vs. interpersonal, and ethical vs. unethical.
For example, the press agentry model is asymmetrical, one-way, mediated, and unethical. Ideal public relations behavior, therefore, is two-way, symmetrical, either mediated or interpersonal, and ethical. These four dimensions, therefore, provide better descriptions of how public relations is practiced and of a normative ideal practice than the four models alone. However, although simple, the four models are still useful to explain public relations to students, organizational leaders who choose a type of PR practice, journalists, and people in general who don’t understand public relations. In addition, I don’t believe the current digital environment has reduced the explanatory power of the models or their underlying dimensions. Instead, digital methods have simply provided new ways of implementing the models.
Two-Way Symmetrical Communication
The two-way symmetrical model is often described as the ideal form of public relations. Yet, in practice, many organizations continue to rely on one-way communication strategies. Do you see symmetrical communication as a realistically achievable model, or primarily as a normative ideal?
The four models of public relations, and the underlying dimensions I just described, have proven to be good descriptions of the different ways that public relations is practiced by different kinds of organizations. Such theoretical descriptions of public relations practice are variables in what is called a positive (or descriptive) theory. The two-way symmetrical model is a positive theory, and it was found to be practiced in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom in the Excellence study. Other researchers have found that the model is practiced in many other countries, although it is not used everywhere.
The symmetrical model also is a normative theoretical concept. Many critics of the model seem to misunderstand the nature of a normative theory. They seem to believe that a normative concept only exists as an ideal and not as a reality. However, a theory would not be a good normative theory if it could not be found in real life. A normative theory must exist in real life and do what it is theoretically supposed to do, such as improve relationships between organizations and publics. I believe symmetrical theory meets this standard and that our research has identified organizations that practice it. As a result, it provides a benchmark for effective and ethical public relations.
At the same time, we know that it is difficult to practice the symmetrical model in some organizations, countries, and cultures. Organizations that believe public relations is a way to dominate their publics aren’t interested in symmetrical communication. Many organizational executives have never heard of public relations being practiced in that way. Public relations practitioners who come from other disciplines such as marketing, advertising, or journalism practice what they know. Marketing and advertising people usually practice the press agentry or two-way asymmetrical models. Journalists typically practice the public information model. Many practitioners, also, cannot practice the symmetrical model because they lack the knowledge or experience to do so.
The question, therefore, is whether all the different ways of understanding, practicing, and teaching public relations are equally good. Would we recommend them to organizational executives or clients or teach them to students: Is every model or every dimension of the models an ideal or normative model? My answer is no. I recommend and teach the two-way symmetrical model. I think it produces relationships that have greater value for publics, organizations, and society. Nevertheless, I know that the model is more difficult to practice in some cultures and political and economic systems than in others. If the model can’t be practiced, I believe the problem is with the culture and political and economic system—not with the public relations profession. In some systems, public relations strives to keep the powerful in power, and it deserves all the criticism it typically receives. However, I believe there is a gradual way to get around this problem. If we as scholars and practitioners can subtly introduce the symmetrical model in practice, it might gradually change the system in which it is practiced. That is not easy, but I could not practice public relations in any other way regardless of the situation in which I work.
Excellence Theory
Excellence Theory positioned public relations as a strategic management function within organizations. Today, do you believe communication professionals are truly integrated into organizational decision-making processes?
As this question states, the major finding of the Excellence study was that participation in the strategic management of an organization was the most important characteristic of excellent public relations. It was even more important than the symmetrical model. Excellent public relations departments were most likely to practice that model, but they also practiced one or more of the other models. Most commonly they practiced both the two-way symmetrical and two-way asymmetrical models. The common element of those models is two-way communication, and the best way to practice two-way communication is to conduct research as a form of organizational listening. In subsequent research, four colleagues and I found that conducting or using research was the major indicator of public relations’ participation in strategic management.2 If a public relations department does not use research, it seldom has anything to contribute to strategic management and is generally not integrated into organizational decision-making processes.
The other reason many practitioners are not included is because of what I call institutionalization. This means that traditions, beliefs, and customs reinforce the idea that public relations is a one-way, asymmetrical, and unethical practice used to reinforce the interests of the powerful. Institutionalization occurs among organizational executives, clients of PR firms, journalists, PR practitioners themselves, and people in general. It is extremely difficult to break free from an institutionalized set of ideas; and, as a result, public relations often continues to be practiced as it always has been. I have done everything I can to break out of this institutionalized means of practicing public relations, and I have encouraged other scholars and professionals to do the same.
The answer to this question, then, is yes and no. Research on and observation of public relations people have identified examples of practitioners in many countries who are integrated into strategic management. Integration is most common in multinational corporations, but it also can be found in small organizations that are less institutionalized and where public relations can be changed more easily. Most practitioners, however, still are not part of strategic management; and much work is needed to change the practice to make it possible for them to be included.
Public Relations and Democratic Society
Your work frequently highlights the constructive role that public relations can play in democratic societies. However, critics often associate public relations with manipulation. To what extent do you think these criticisms are justified?
As I said in response to your previous questions, many, if not most, public relations practitioners and their client organizations still believe that public relations is a way to manipulate the media, government, employees, customers, stockholders, and other stakeholders to think and behave as the organization wants. This manipulation wouldn’t be so bad if these practitioners truly understood and had the interests of publics in mind. A good example is health communication, where communicators with good intentions try to persuade their publics to engage in healthy behaviors. Often, however, health communicators don’t understand why publics engage in seemingly unhealthy behaviors; and their messages are ignored. If they researched—listened to—their publics before preparing messages, these communicators generally would be more effective. Unfortunately, communicators and their clients typically believe that an organization’s interests are the same as public interests. Sometimes they are right; more often they are wrong.
I recently wrote an essay on the role of public relations in facilitating social inclusion in a democratic society.3 At this point in my life, social inclusion seems to be the thread that has run through my work, beginning with my research on ways to include Colombian peasant farmers in the decision making of the organizations with which they need relationships and with society in general. Publics typically have different identities, as defined, for example, by race, wealth, poverty, sexual orientation, location, culture, occupation, gender, education, or political philosophy. Organizations typically include the problems of some of these publics in their strategic decision making and exclude others. Publics that are excluded, however, often have problems they would like organizations to help solve. Others encounter problems created by the consequences of organizational decisions. Public relations, I believe, can provide a means of organizational listening that includes these otherwise socially excluded publics. To serve as a means of social inclusion, however, public relations usually must be practiced as a strategic, symmetrical, research-based profession—i.e., following the principles of the Excellence theories.
Digital Platforms and Symmetrical Communication
Digital platforms and social media theoretically enable more interactive communication between organizations and their publics. Do you think these developments have strengthened the model of symmetrical communication, or have they produced new forms of asymmetrical communication?
When digital platforms for communication were first introduced, I was optimistic that they would encourage symmetrical communication and make organization-centric asymmetrical communication difficult. Public relations practitioners once believed that they could control the information going to their publics. However, now that many sources of information are available on the internet and social media, it is almost impossible to control the information going to publics. Search engines, and now artificial intelligence, make it easy for actively communicating members of publics to get information about organizations—their decisions, behaviors, products, ethics, social responsibility, and competitors. At the same time, these platforms make it easy for organizations to research and listen to their publics, understand their problems, and give them a voice in strategic decision making. Thus, symmetrical communication should have become institutionalized by now.
However, a new phenomenon has emerged that I called de facto social exclusion in the article I described in my last answer. Individuals, organizations, and publics typically communicate with others who share the same identities and problems and exclude themselves from communicating with those who are different. De facto social exclusion has been encouraged by narrow-minded media and digital platforms. It also makes people susceptible to misinformation. The phenomenon is particularly evident in political communication in the United States, in which organizations and publics have organized themselves into warring ideological factions. Therefore, I believe you are correct in suggesting that digital platforms have encouraged new forms of asymmetrical communication.
I don’t yet have a firm solution to this problem of de facto social exclusion. I believe the eventual solution will be to educate young people about different forms of thinking and communicating so that they don’t fall into the trap of close-mindedness and confirmation bias when they communicate with others. Cognitive scientists and communication scientists know a lot about these processes, and we need to teach people about them at early ages. It’s also important to include these theories in the education of public relations professionals.
Algorithms and Organizational Communication
Communication environments today are increasingly shaped by algorithms. How do you think algorithmic media environments are transforming the relationship between organizations and their publics?
On the one hand, algorithms can be helpful to both organizations and publics by channeling relevant information to and from publics and minimizing the onslaught of irrelevant information that most of us typically receive in traditional and digital media. Identifying what information is relevant to information seekers has been the primary focus of my situational theory of publics, and that theory is relevant to this question. The theory explains that people are most likely to actively seek or passively acquire information that is relevant to problems they recognize, that involve them, and that they can do something about. I call these variables problem recognition, involvement recognition, and constraint recognition. These variables explain when, why, and about what people communicate.4 In doing so, they explain what information members of publics are most likely to use. Algorithms can filter such relevant information from irrelevant information—thus increasing the probability of successful messaging. The same principles can be used to explain the information coming from publics that public relations practitioners are likely to pay attention to.
However, both active and passive communication behaviors can lead to de facto social inclusion. The result is a dilemma: How can publics and organizations seek information from each other that is relevant to problems they face without falling into the trap of de facto exclusion of sources with different identities and solutions to problems? Algorithms can filter information into categories that either include others or exclude them. Algorithms derived from our previous communication behaviors, therefore, could be inclusive or exclusive. A solution to this dilemma is to expand our communication behaviors to include relevant information from sources we might usually avoid—thus expanding the algorithm and eventually organization-public relationships.
Ethics and Public Responsibility in Public Relations
There is often a tension between organizational interests and the broader public interest. In your view, how should public relations professionals navigate this balance?
Public relations scholars and professionals have debated whether the public relationsfunction should be the ethical conscience of an organization or of organized publics. Critics of the profession, however, believe that public relations is inherently unethical and could never serve this role. Those of us who have an expansive view of public relations believe its role should include monitoring and supporting ethics and public responsibility in strategic management. The question, therefore, is what is required for public relations people to serve in this role. I have addressed this question in detail in another article.5
In that article, I described seven ethical problems that public relations people typically encounter. These included personal ethical decisions; relationships with clients and other practitioners; loyalty to organizations, publics, and society; choice of a client or organization; advocate and counselor roles; secrecy and openness; and digital media.
In that article, I also constructed a theory of public relations ethics and social responsibility. I believe that public relations professionals need a theory of ethics before they can advise others on what behaviors are ethical or unethical. Ethical scholars have developed two types of theories: consequentialist (teleological or utilitarian) and rules-based (deontological). A consequentialist theory maintains that the morality of a decision or behavior depends on the consequences it has on others, such as whether an organization’s behavior has positive or negative consequences on its publics. The same theory would apply to the consequences that a public has on an organization or requests from that organization. Consequentialist ethics becomes complicated, however, when a decision or behavior has positive consequences for the organization but not its publics, or vice versa. Or, when the decision or behavior has positive consequences for some publics but not others or for society at large. This is why the term utilitarian also is used for the consequentialist approach. The proposed solution is “the greatest good for the greater number.” With that rule, however, some participants generally experience positive consequences and others negative consequences. As a result, minorities usually are disadvantaged.
Rules-based or deontological ethicists, on the other hand, solve this problem by proposing moral rules for judging the ethics of a decision or behavior. Shannon Bowen, of the University of South Carolina, developed such a set of rules for public relations in her doctoral dissertation at the University of Maryland, and I recommend reading her research. She developed these rules mostly from the work of Immanuel Kant. Her dissertation and several other articles on ethics can be found on the research website ResearchGate.net (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shannon-Bowen), including an article on the ethics of artificial intelligence.
Two rules that I think are especially important for public relations are disclosure and symmetrical communication. With these rules, I have constructed an uncomplicated ethical theory for public relations that contains both consequences and rules:
Teleology: Ethical public relations professionals should monitor the consequences that potential organizational decisions or behaviors might have on publics.
Deontology: Ethical public relations professionals then have the moral obligation to disclose these consequences to publics that are affected and to engage in symmetrical communication with them about resolving the consequences.
The same rule applies to publics, such as activist groups, that request or even demand consequences from organizations and to organizations that affect each other, such as governments and corporations. In addition, the disclosure rule can be used to make asymmetrical communication activities morally acceptable. That is, the rule states that organizations using asymmetrical communication methods have the moral obligation to disclose the source of their communications. This rule, for example, would rule out such activities as forming front groups with fake name, news releases that don’t disclose the source of the alleged “news story,” or activist groups that don’t reveal their funding sources.
I also believe that the concept of consequences helps to understand the nature of social or public responsibility. Socially responsible organizations should attempt to eliminate or manage the negative consequences of their behaviors on publics, such as pollution, discrimination, or overpricing of products. In addition, publics or other organizations, such as regulators, that request consequences from organizations need to acknowledge and manage those consequences. When consequences conflict, these different groups again have the moral obligation to engage in symmetrical communication to acknowledge the competing consequences and attempt to negotiate their differences.
Organizations can also judge the value of proactive social responsibility programs, such as charitable contributions, sponsorships, or special events, by assessing the potential positive consequences of these programs on publics with which they have a relationship or need to have a relationship—rather than developing such programs only for publicity or “image making.”
The Future of Public Relations Education
Public relations education has expanded significantly around the world. Yet there are ongoing debates about the gap between academic education and professional practice. Do you believe such a gap still exists today?
Ideally, education for professional public relations should work like education in other professions, such as medicine. The most important contribution of educators is research. They develop theories to improve practice and then do research to determine if these theories have worked or could work in practice. They consult with practitioners to learn about problems they experience that research could help to solve and advise them on new approaches suggested by research. The research is published in academic journals for peer review. The theories and examples of the theories being used in practice then form the substance taught in university classrooms and for continuing education of practitioners through professional organizations, short courses, and occasional lectures. In the Excellence study, for example, we learned that excellent public relations practitioners have relevant knowledge gained in one of four ways: undergraduate or graduate education in public relations, continuing education, reading academic and professional journals, and consulting with academics or other practitioners with similar advanced knowledge.
This approach to professional education is becoming more common in public relations, but it is not found universally. There are several reasons. Academics often conduct research that has little relevance to practice, and professionals ignore it. Many practitioners have little formal knowledge of public relations, make little attempt to gain it, and badmouth it to others. Other practitioners learn outmoded ideas from each other and pass them on to client organizations. That explains why the press agentry model, which is the least effective and ethical, is still probably the model most practiced around the world. For these reasons, there often is a gap between academic education and professional practice. I have seen notable progress in my 65 years of public relations practice and education. Nevertheless, we still have work to do.
The Future of Public Relations
Finally, in an era marked by rapid technological transformation, how do you envision the future of public relations? Which research areas should the next generation of scholars focus on?
I think there is little question that digital and social media along with artificial intelligence will dominate the future of public relations. Scholars already are devoting a great deal of attention to these new forms of communication. At the same time, I don’t think these new technologies make our best current public relations theories outmoded.
Unfortunately, these technologies can be used for ineffective and unethical public relations, just like old technologies. They also can be used to implement theories such as the Excellence theory. I have become excited about artificial intelligence, for example, just from my personal use. It is a wonderful way to explore several sources to learn what publics are experiencing and the problems they face. Thus, AI can be used for research. It also can be used to monitor the ethics and social responsibility of organizations. At the same time, we have seen that the new technologies can be used for similar purposes as old technologies were used in ineffective, unethical, and irresponsible public relations practice. Therefore, we need ethics scholars and critical scholars to continue to shine light on these practices.
I hope that research will continue to be done to learn how to implement the strategic, symmetrical, and ethical principles of Excellence theory in different settings around the world. At the same time, theories should never be static and should grow and be improved by continuing research. For example, my colleagues and I proposed several years ago that the Excellence principles are generic principles that can be used in different cultures and political and economic systems, if they are adapted to specific conditions in different settings. We call this theory generic principles and specific applications. I have seen a great deal of research in different countries that has done just that. The same is true for other theories such as principles of crisis communication, ethics, and dialogue. I urge scholars not to throw out older theories just so they can contribute something new. I believe we should merge the old and the new so that the profession grows and scholars avoid reinventing the wheel.
Your photographic practice often places people and their personal stories at the center. As a photographer, how do you position the human face and body as a medium of visual storytelling?
For me, the human face is not simply a subject — it is a landscape of lived experience. In portrait photography I am less interested in appearance than in presence: that fragile moment when a person stops performing and allows themselves to simply exist in front of the camera. The face and body become a visual language through which memory, emotion, and identity can emerge.
You studied at the Łódź Film School, an institution known for its strong cinematic tradition. How has this background influenced your photographic aesthetics and compositional approach?
Studying at the Łódź Film School profoundly shaped the way I think about images. Cinema teaches you to think not only in frames but also in atmosphere, rhythm, and narrative tension. Even when I create a single photograph, I try to build a frame that feels like a fragment of a larger story — an image that suggests what happened before and what might unfold after the moment captured.
Portrait photography is often described not only as the production of an image but also as the creation of a relationship. How does the interaction you establish with your subjects shape the visual narrative of your photographs?
A portrait is always a relationship. The photograph is only the visible result of an invisible process: trust. When that trust appears, the person in front of the camera begins to reveal something more authentic than any pose could produce. My role as a photographer is to create a space where that authenticity can emerge naturally.
In your portfolio, thematic series such as Women, Men, Love & Marriage, and Family & Kids stand out. Do you see these categories simply as practical groupings, or as an attempt to capture different social and emotional stages of human life?
These categories reflect more than a practical structure. They represent different emotional and social dimensions of human life. Childhood, individuality, partnership, and family are stages through which identity evolves. Through photography, I am interested in observing how these relationships shape the way people see themselves and one another.
Digital technologies have radically transformed the production and circulation of photography. In your view, how has this transformation affected photography’s relationship with authenticity, intimacy, and documentary truth?
Digital technology has dramatically accelerated the production and circulation of images. However, authenticity in photography has never depended on technology itself — it depends on intention. Documentary truth is not only about what the camera records, but about the ethical relationship between the photographer, the subject, and the viewer.
Portrait photography often involves a delicate balance between spontaneity and staging. How do you establish an aesthetic and ethical balance between these two dimensions in your work?
Portraiture always exists somewhere between observation and interpretation. Light, space, and composition create a visual framework, but the most meaningful moments are rarely fully controlled. I try to create conditions where spontaneity can happen, rather than directing every gesture.
What are your thoughts on the role of photography in shaping social memory and personal identity? In particular, how do you see family and personal portraits functioning as cultural documents for the future?
Photography is one of the most powerful tools for preserving both personal and collective memory. A family portrait may seem ordinary today, but decades later it can become an invaluable cultural document. Photographs quietly accumulate meaning over time, revealing how people lived, how they loved, and how they understood themselves.
Are there particular artists, photographers, or traditions in cinema and art history that have influenced your visual language?
I am inspired by photographers who approach portraiture as a way of understanding society and the human condition. August Sander’s systematic exploration of people and social identity, as well as Sebastião Salgado’s deeply humanistic documentary work, have been particularly influential for me. Their photographs demonstrate how portraiture can move beyond representation and become a form of visual anthropology. At the same time, cinema has strongly influenced my visual language, especially in the way atmosphere and narrative tension can shape a single frame.
Social media has become a central space for contemporary photographic culture. How do you think these platforms are transforming the aesthetics and meaning-making processes of photography?
Social media has transformed photography into a global and immediate form of communication. Images travel faster and reach wider audiences than ever before. At the same time, the speed of this circulation can sometimes reduce the depth of engagement. The challenge for photographers today is to create images that still have the power to slow the viewer down and invite reflection.
Finally, how would you define the role of photography in today’s world? Do you see it primarily as a tool of witnessing reality, or as a medium for more personal and emotional narratives?
Today photography occupies many roles simultaneously. It documents reality, but it also interprets it. The most compelling photographs often exist somewhere between these two dimensions — where observation meets emotion, and where a single image can carry both personal and universal meaning.
Interview Series: Media Arts, Visual Communication Design, and Technologies | Interviewer: Gökhan Çolak
Esen Kunt | Istanbul Nişantaşı University Faculty Member and Author; Founder and Creative Director of Istanbul Deleuze Studies.
Image, Thought, and Film Theory
How do your studies, which center on the relationship between image and thought, establish a theoretical affinity with Gilles Deleuze’s theories of cinema and the image? Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze remains a central reference in film studies. In your view, how should this concept be rethought in the face of digital and post-cinematic images?
I conceive the relationship between image and thought not as a hierarchical link between an image that represents and a consciousness that reads it, but as two thresholds that mutually produce and transform one another. For this reason, the image is not, for me, the visual counterpart or illustration of thought; rather, it is a surface upon which thinking itself takes place—an evental field.
This approach, of course, establishes a direct connection with Deleuze’s texts—particularly Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. However, this connection is not so much a mode of reading that applies Deleuze’s concepts as it is a relationship that folds the possibilities of thought he opened toward other directions. Deleuze’s treatment of the image not as a mental representation but as a force operating through the body, space, and time constitutes one of the fundamental thresholds of my work.
I often approach the relationship between image and thought on a cartographic plane. In other words, the image is not an object that carries a fixed meaning; rather, it is a practice of mapping that traverses memory, the body, geography, and time. Deleuze’s notion of the ‘brain-screen’ marks a critical turning point for me: thought is no longer an internal representation but becomes an event that occurs outside—on the surface, on the screen. At this point, the image is no longer a vehicle for thought; it becomes thought itself.
In my own work, I develop this approach particularly through rhizomatic memory, cartographic imagination, and bodily surfaces. I treat the image not as a record that represents the past, but as a passage—continually rewritten—that opens between past and present. This intersects with Deleuze’s understanding of the time-image: a nonlinear, branching, and layered conception of time. For me, however, this temporality is not only cinematic; it is also geological, bodily, and spatial.
For this reason, I interpret the relationship between image and thought less through ‘meaning production’ than through relations of force. What interests me about an image is not what it shows, but what it sets into vibration—which layers of memory, which bodily sensations, and which spatial associations it activates. This orientation leads me not so much to read the image as to think with it, even to observe the image in the act of thinking.
In short, Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema and the image functions in my work less as a reference point than as a threshold for thinking. My effort to remove the image from the domain of representation and approach it instead as a shared surface of thought, memory, and the body establishes a line that both converses with Deleuze and opens toward other directions. I sustain this line as a field of production that moves between text, image, map, and body—fluid, unsettled, and resistant to fixation.
Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze remains powerful because it makes unmistakably clear that the gaze is never innocent—that seeing is always bound up with power, desire, and the body. However, in my view, this concept is no longer sufficient on its own in the face of digital and post-cinematic images. The issue today is not merely who is looking, but where the gaze is constructed, how it circulates, and the extent to which it no longer belongs to any single subject.
In classical cinema, the gaze was largely fixed within a single perspective—anchored in the position of the camera and at the center of the narrative. In digital and post-cinematic images, however, the gaze loses its center. What we now encounter is not merely the gaze of a male subject, but dispersed, fragmented, and plural regimes of vision produced by algorithms, interfaces, platforms, and data flows. For this reason, I believe it is necessary today to rethink the male gaze not as belonging to a stable subject, but as a visual apparatus.
At this point, Deleuze’s understanding of the image becomes decisive for me. The image is no longer an object viewed by a subject; rather, it is a field of force that affects the body, time, and space. In post-cinematic images, the gaze spreads beyond the eye to encompass the entire body—manifesting in scrolling movements, tactile gestures, and repetitive viewing loops. The gaze is no longer purely visual; it transforms into a haptic, temporal, and embodied experience.
For this reason, it seems more meaningful to me today to read the male gaze not merely as a ‘male’ gaze, but as normative modes of looking. Although this normativity may appear independent of gender in digital images, it establishes a regime that re-disciples the body through speed, exposure, transparency, and constant visibility. In other words, the gaze does not disappear; it changes form.
In my work, what interests me about this transformation is not so much reversing the gaze as dispersing it. I engage with images that disrupt the camera’s dominant position, refuse to fix the gaze, and do not place the viewer in a position of comfort. This is less a feminist counter-gaze than a strategy that destabilizes the gaze itself. Here, the image does not satisfy desire; it suspends it, delays it, and leads it astray.
In this sense, post-cinematic images do not invalidate the male gaze; rather, they multiply it, branch it out, and render it less visible. We are no longer speaking of the dominance of a single gaze, but of gazes that intersect, collide, and at times become subjectless. This invites us to ask not so much who wields the gaze, but what the gaze does. For me today, the central issue is this: an image concerns not only whom it belongs to, but also whom it touches. And perhaps the most political question now is not how these images compel us to look, but how they compel us to feel.
Visual Culture and the Agency of the Image
Within the context of W. J. T. Mitchell’s question ‘What do pictures want?’, what does it mean for you to approach visual culture not merely at the level of representation, but as an active and thinking field? How does Hans Belting’s anthropological approach to the image offer a theoretical framework for understanding the historical and cultural circulation of images in your work?
For me, W. J. T. Mitchell’s question ‘What do pictures want?’ became a threshold that radically transformed the direction of how I understand images. This question invites us to move beyond seeing the image as a passive representation and instead to think of it as if it were a subject endowed with desire, demand, and agency. What matters here is not whether images literally ‘want’ anything, but how we come to recognize them as a field of activity.
I approach visual culture not as a display window through which meanings are presented, but as a field in which thought, memory, and the body are set into motion. The image does not merely show something; it calls, compels, unsettles, and delays. Mitchell’s question shifts the focus from ‘What does the image say?’ to ‘What does the image do?’ This is a crucial displacement in my work, because here the image is no longer a representation—it is an event.
At this point, Hans Belting’s anthropological approach to the image provides a complementary theoretical ground for my work. Belting treats the image neither solely as a mental representation nor merely as a material object; rather, he conceptualizes it as an entity that circulates between body, environment, and media. While this approach explains the historical and cultural continuity of images, it also takes into account how they are experienced in embodied ways.My concept of Pellicule Corporalis comes into direct contact with Belting’s line of thought. Here, the body is not the carrier of the image; it is the surface upon which the image takes place. The image inscribes itself onto the body, resonates within it, and is deferred through it. When it comes to cinematic or post-cinematic images, the image no longer resides solely on the screen; it circulates across the skin, within the folds of memory, and along sensory thresholds.
While Belting’s image anthropology demonstrates how images historically change hands and migrate, my interest concentrates on the traces this migration leaves on the body. As images circulate across cultures, they do not merely change form; they also transform regimes of embodied perception. For this reason, visual culture is, for me, not only a domain in which images proliferate, but an ecology in which bodies are recalibrated.
When I think Mitchell and Belting together, the image is no longer a silent object nor merely a text to be read. It becomes an entity that demands, circulates, relocates, and compels us to shift our own positions. In my work, the relationship established with the image aims less at decoding it than at thinking alongside it. Because, to my mind, the image wants this:
Not to be looked at, but to be responded to.
Not to be understood, but to be sustained within the body. And perhaps most of all, to be displaced.
Performativity, Text, and the Body
With the work of Judith Butler in particular, debates on performativity have redefined the relationship between text and body. How do you position performative literary texts within this theoretical framework?
Judith Butler’s notion of performativity fundamentally transformed the relationship between text and body, because it demonstrated that language does not merely represent—it acts. What is spoken, written, and repeated comes to constitute the body, revealing identity, gender, and subjectivity not as outcomes but as processes. This marked a critical threshold for me: the text is no longer about the body; it happens within the body.
I position performative literary texts within the framework opened by Butler, yet by extending it further. I conceive of the text not as a vehicle of expression, but as a bodily event. Writing here is not a structure that carries meaning; it is a sequence of actions that leaves traces on the body, generates rhythm, and organizes breath and time. The reader, in turn, is no longer simply one who ‘reads’ the text, but becomes a body that shifts position along with it.The concept of rhizomatic memory carries this performativity onto a non-linear plane. A performative text is not a structure with a single beginning or end; it is a multi-centered network that connects different temporalities, voices, and bodily sensations. As the text is repeated, it does not become fixed; with each reading, it activates another layer of embodied memory. In this sense, the performative text operates within a regime of repetition, as Butler suggests—but this repetition produces less the reproduction of the norm than a deviation that sets the norm into vibration.
The concept of Pellicule Corporalis defines the surface of the text here. The body is not the carrier of the text; it is the pellicle upon which the text is inscribed. Words come into contact with the skin, spread through the voice, and are cut by the breath. The performative literary text does not exist to be read, but to take place within the body. For this reason, such texts often do not feel complete; they remain open, fragile, and inclined toward incompletion—because the body itself is never a closed whole.
For me, performative literature releases language from representation and places it within a bodily temporality. The text here is not a repository of meaning, but an instruction for movement, a call to gesture, a sensory threshold. The reader does not decode the text; rather, they pause with it, walk with it, wait, and hesitate. In this way, literature ceases to be a silent domain and becomes an encounter between bodies.
In this context, the performative text is also politically significant. Every text written upon the body is simultaneously negotiating with regimes of power, normativity, and visibility. My interest is drawn not to forms that stabilize the body, but to those that displace it—disturbing its comfort and disrupting its rhythm. This constitutes a writing practice that reverses the normative repetitions of Butlerian performativity and opens lines of flight.
Ultimately, for me, the performative literary text is neither merely a literary genre nor simply a theoretical application. It is a form of writing that thinks together with the body.
“The text does the following here: It does not narrate. It touches.
It does not define. It sets into vibration. It does not represent. It happens.
And perhaps most importantly: It remains in the memory of the body.”
Space, Visual Culture, and Poetic Cartography
Considering figures such as Edward Soja and Henri Lefebvre, who think visual culture together with space, how does your approach of ‘poetic cartography’ relate to this body of literature? In your work The Tacit Geologies of the Bosphorus, you address space as intertwined with narrative and thought. Is it possible to read this approach alongside Michel de Certeau’s understanding of space and everyday practices?
“To think space together with visual culture does not, for me, mean treating it as a measurable or representable surface. On the contrary, I conceive of space as a process woven through time, memory, and embodied experience. In this respect, Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the production of space and Edward Soja’s concept of Thirdspace mark important thresholds for me, as they demonstrate that space is neither merely a physical nor a mental category, but a domain that is lived, felt, and continuously reconstituted.
However, my approach of poetic cartography establishes less a relation of full alignment with this literature than one of deviation. While Soja and Lefebvre open space through social relations and structures of power, I approach space also as a sensory, fragile, and tacit entity. Poetic cartography is not a map that explains space; it is a practice of drawing that renders perceptible the inner rhythms, gaps, and interruptions of space. The map here is not an outcome. The map is the movement of thought. The line does not impose a boundary; it carries vibration.The Tacit Geologies of the Bosphorus emerged precisely as a result of this approach. I did not treat the Bosphorus as a historical or geographical object, but as a layered memory—an embodied, geological, political, and affective entity. Space here is not the backdrop of the narrative; it is the narrative itself. Stone, water, current, and silence shape the language of the text.
This approach can certainly be expanded—without confining it—by extending the discussion to Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion and reading it alongside Michel de Certeau’s understanding of space and everyday practices; indeed, such a reading generates a productive tension. De Certeau’s idea of ‘writing space through walking’ intersects, for me, with the notion of space as a surface of bodily inscription. Yet I do not regard this walking as solely a human-centered practice. In The Tacit Geologies of the Bosphorus, it is not only the body that walks; geological time, currents, sediments, and suppressed memories walk as well.
While de Certeau demonstrates how space is appropriated through everyday practices, my interest lies in how space resists, how it remains tacit, how it never fully discloses itself. Poetic cartography is a practice that respects this reticence. It does not attempt to render everything visible; rather, it deliberately leaves certain gaps and silences outside the map. For this reason, my maps are never complete—because space itself is never complete.
Poetic cartography is not an aesthetic that represents space within visual culture; it is a mode of writing that thinks alongside space. Here, space is not read; it is listened to. It is not merely seen; it is excavated. The map does not orient; it disorients.
And perhaps most importantly, it proposes this:
“Space is not a surface that belongs to us;it is a memory through which we pass.“
The Digital Image, Circulation and the Archive
In the context of the circulation of digital images, Hito Steyerl’s concept of the ‘poor image’ makes visible not only the loss of resolution, but also the historical and spatial layers of images. Within your approach of poetic cartography, what kind of intellectual and aesthetic possibility does this ‘impoverished yet dense’ state of the image offer?
Hito Steyerl’s concept of the ‘poor image’ is highly significant for me because it demonstrates that digital images are not merely copies degraded by a loss of resolution; rather, they are entities that intensify, accelerate, and leave traces through circulation. As the poor image loses visual quality, it gains historical and spatial weight. In a sense, the more the image relinquishes resolution, the closer it moves toward memory.
In my approach of poetic cartography, this ‘impoverished yet dense’ image is not an object to be represented, but a line of circulation to be mapped. The image’s loss of pixels is not, for me, a deficiency; it is the way layered time rises to the surface. Low resolution strips the image of smoothness, producing cracks, gaps, and delays. It is precisely within these fissures that the image begins to think.
A sentence I frequently return to from The Tacit Geologies of the Bosphorus in this context is this:
“Blur is sometimes not the absence of vision, but the density of memory.”
Steyerl’s poor image operates in my poetic cartography as a trace in displacement. The image does not belong to a fixed location; it circulates between screens, loses context, and reconnects. This circulation renders the image less archivable and more experiential. The map here is not a collection, but a network of passages.
When considering questions of the archive, memory, and layered temporality in visual culture, at which points does Georges Didi-Huberman’s approach to the image intersect with your work?
At this point, a strong intersection emerges with Georges Didi-Huberman’s understanding of the image. Didi-Huberman never conceives of the image as a completed whole; for him, the image is a remnant, a shell, a burn mark. It does not represent the past; it carries the wound that the past continues to open in the present. This approach directly resonates with my conception of rhizomatic memory.
Following what glimmers in the dark—what remains unsaid, what is unseen—has profoundly shaped my methodologies of writing and thinking with both passion and insistence. I am, moreover, an ardent and even obsessive reader of Didi-Huberman’s texts—devoted enough to follow the trail of the fireflies.
Didi-Huberman’s relationship with the archive is particularly decisive for me: the archive is not a sealed repository of memory, but a structure that continually reopens, leaks, and remains incomplete. Poetic cartography is concerned precisely with this leakage. The image does not freeze within the archive; on the contrary, it displaces the archive.
In this context, Pellicule Corporalis offers a critical threshold for thinking about the embodied dimension of the digital image. The poor image is not merely a file circulating across screens; it is a vibration that resonates within the body. The condition of ‘survival’ that Didi-Huberman seeks in the image acquires here a form of embodied continuity. The image may lose resolution, yet it does not lose its bodily impact. As I often emphasize in my texts and visual works:
“The more the image becomes impoverished,the closer it moves to the body.“
For this reason, the circulation of digital images is not, for me, a story of loss, but a geography of intensified memory. Steyerl’s poor image and Didi-Huberman’s residual image converge in poetic cartography: both read the image not through lack, but through its capacity to survive. Ultimately, in my work, the digital image is not data to be archived, but a layered sediment of time. It is not mapped; it is traced.
It does not represent; it wounds. And perhaps most importantly, it reminds us of this:
“Even in its poorest state, the image continues to think.“
Theoretical Communities and Interdisciplinarity
How do the discussions carried out under the umbrella of Istanbul Deleuze Studies provide a theoretical opening for visual culture, cinema, and philosophy studies in Türkiye?Rosi Braidotti approaches interdisciplinarity as a mode of thinking that transcends anthropocentric regimes of knowledge while carrying ethical and aesthetic dimensions. In your work—particularly in The Tacit Geologies of the Bosphorus—which brings academic production into dialogue with creative writing, mapping, and aesthetic experience, what kind of intellectual and productive positioning does this posthumanist interdisciplinarity represent for you?
The most significant contribution of the discussions conducted under the umbrella of Istanbul Deleuze Studies to visual culture, cinema, and philosophy in Türkiye lies in approaching Deleuze not as a ‘theoretical authority,’ but as a practice of thinking. Here, Deleuze does not offer a closed system of concepts; rather, he creates an open intellectual field that circulates across disciplines, branches outward, and comes into contact with local experiences. Such a theoretical community functions by decentering theory. As cinema, visual culture, architecture, literature, and philosophy become articulated with one another under this framework, concepts lose their fixed meanings; they shift, relocate, and become re-embodied. In a city like Istanbul—dense with historical, political, and geological layers—discussing Deleuzian thought in this way prevents concepts from remaining abstract, bringing them instead into contact with space, the body, and everyday experience.
For me, the primary space opened by Istanbul Deleuze Studies lies in transforming theory from an individual domain of expertise into a collective ground for thinking. Within this terrain, theory is used not to explain, but to think together, to deviate, and to take risks. This, in turn, offers visual culture and film studies in Türkiye a perspective oriented toward becoming, process, and force—one that moves beyond representation-centered readings. Additionally, there is a long-developed project of mine—emerging from my postdoctoral research, which will begin operating interdisciplinarily in 2026. Let us simply say that it is a multilayered initiative through which we will establish significant entanglements among architecture, contemporary art, visual culture, literature, performance arts, and, of course, philosophy—very soon.
At this point, Rosi Braidotti’s understanding of interdisciplinarity as a posthumanist ethical and aesthetic practice provides a highly formative framework for my own work. Braidotti conceives interdisciplinarity not merely as a passage between methods, but as a positioning that transcends anthropocentric regimes of knowledge. The issue, then, is not simply to place different disciplines side by side; it is to rethink, together, the subject who produces knowledge, the body, and the world.
The Tacit Geologies of the Bosphorus can be read as a work in which this posthumanist interdisciplinarity becomes concrete. In the text, the human is not the center of the narrative. Geological layers, currents, stone, sediment, and silence become active components of thought. Writing here is not a human story, but a field of encounter with nonhuman forces. This approach, as Braidotti suggests, renders thought not only a critical practice, but also an ethically responsible one.
When I think of academic production as intertwined with creative writing, mapping, and aesthetic experience, interdisciplinarity becomes for me not a method, but a mode of existence. Text, map, and image do not explain one another; they displace one another. This disrupts the linear progression of knowledge. In The Tacit Geologies of the Bosphorus, the map does not represent geography; it thinks alongside writing. Writing does not explain; it excavates.
In this context, posthumanist interdisciplinarity signifies, for me, the redistribution of thought—no longer as an activity belonging solely to the human mind, but as something dispersed among bodies, materials, spaces, and images. This distribution is as much an aesthetic gesture as it is an ethical choice. For a mode of thought that does not place the human at the center is also one that is more attentive, slower, and more responsible.
Ultimately, theoretical communities such as Istanbul Deleuze Studies and Braidotti’s posthumanist interdisciplinarity converge in a shared space within my work: theory here is not a closed domain of knowledge, but a common ground opened by thinking, writing, and mapping together.
And perhaps most importantly, it reminds us of this:
“Thought is never produced alone. It gathers, circulates, and transforms— toward what shimmers in the dark.“
I would also like to thank you for these thoughtful and evocative questions; it is truly valuable for us, as a journal, to be part of this collective project. I extend my gratitude to the entire team for their meticulous and dedicated work.
Interview Series: Sociology of Communication, Public Relations, and Digital Transformation | Interviewer: Gokhan Colak
Martina Topic-Rutherford | Associate Professor in Public Relations Leadership at the University of Alabama
Theoretical Positioning and Interdisciplinarity
Your book Workplace Culture in Mass Communication Industries approaches communication sectors through a sociological lens. Why is it crucial to place cultural analysis at the center when seeking to understand mass communication industries?
Mass communication industries do not merely produce messages; they produce meaning, legitimacy, and social hierarchy. A purely managerial or instrumental approach cannot explain why certain actors rise, why certain styles of leadership are normalized, or why certain communicative behaviors feel “natural” within organizations.
Cultural analysis allows us to see communication industries as fields structured by power relations, symbolic capital, and historically sedimented practices. Organizational culture is not a decorative layer; it is the mechanism through which legitimacy is distributed and professional belonging is regulated. Without cultural analysis, we misunderstand how authority is constructed and how inequality persists even in seemingly progressive sectors.
There have been ongoing critiques suggesting that historical and sociological perspectives are still underutilized in public relations research. How do you assess the theoretical maturity of the field today?
The field has matured methodologically, but theoretically it remains uneven. There is strong empirical output, yet historical and sociological grounding is still underdeveloped.
Public relations research often emphasizes effectiveness, strategy, or stakeholder management, but less frequently interrogates the structural conditions that shape the profession. Concepts such as legitimacy, capital distribution, field struggle, and habitus allow us to move beyond surface-level analysis and examine the profession as a site of power reproduction. Theoretical maturity requires reflexivity, asking not only what PR does, but what social order it sustains.
Masculine Habitus, Power, and Leadership
In Towards a New Understanding of Masculine Habitus and Women and Leadership in Public Relations, you construct a Bourdieusian framework. Is “masculine habitus” one of the most invisible yet powerful mechanisms operating within contemporary organizations?
Yes, precisely because it is invisible. Masculine habitus operates not as overt discrimination but as embodied normativity. It shapes expectations around confidence, decisiveness, emotional restraint, and leadership style. These dispositions appear neutral, yet they are historically coded.
What makes masculine habitus powerful is that it functions as doxa, as common sense, and a taken-for-granted knowledge. Women entering leadership roles are often evaluated against criteria they did not design and that are presented as universal. The violence here is symbolic, not explicit, which makes it harder to contest.
Despite the strong presence of women in the public relations sector, inequalities persist in leadership positions. How might this paradox be explained through the structural distribution of capital?
Numerical presence does not equal capital ownership. Women may dominate numerically in public relations, but leadership requires access to social capital (elite networks) and symbolic capital (recognition as legitimate authority). These forms of capital remain unevenly distributed.
Additionally, women are often concentrated in relational or communicative roles that generate social capital for organizations but not necessarily symbolic capital for themselves. The paradox reflects structural asymmetry in capital conversion.
Diversity discourse within organizations often remains a normative ideal rather than a lived reality. Do you believe institutions can generate genuine transformation at the level of habitus?
Institutional change is easier at the level of policy than at the level of habitus. Habitus is embodied history. It changes slowly and often unconsciously. Diversity initiatives can alter representation, but unless they shift what counts as legitimate authority, confidence, or professionalism, they leave the underlying structure intact. Transformation requires altering evaluative criteria, not simply who occupies positions, but what dispositions are rewarded.
Social Capital and Organizational Culture
Your research demonstrates that organizational culture is produced not only through formal structures but also through everyday practices. How should we rethink the relationship between networking and professional belonging today?
Networking is often framed as an individual strategy. Sociologically, it is a mechanism of boundary maintenance. Belonging emerges through shared codes, ways of speaking, interacting, and signaling competence. Networking events reproduce culture not only by exchanging contacts but by reinforcing dispositions. Professional belonging today is less about formal membership and more about symbolic alignment. Who “fits” remains a deeply cultural judgment.
With the rise of hybrid and remote work models, is the reproduction of organizational culture becoming more difficult, or are we witnessing the emergence of a new form of professional habitus?
Both. Hybrid work disrupts informal reproduction of culture, spontaneous encounters, embodied observation of leadership styles, and subtle cues of legitimacy. However, it also generates a new digital habitus. Visibility now operates through responsiveness, digital fluency, curated presence, and written communication style. Capital is accumulating differently. We are witnessing the reconfiguration of symbolic capital, not its disappearance.
Media, Capitalism, and Gender
Women and the Media in Capitalism and Socialism compares representations of women across different economic systems. Do you still observe traces of these models within today’s global media environment?
Yes, but in a hybridized form. Capitalist media continue to commodify femininity, linking empowerment to consumption and visibility. Yet traces of collectivist narratives persist in discourses of solidarity and structural critique. Global media now operate within platform capitalism, where algorithms amplify certain gendered performances. The ideological distinction between capitalism and socialism is less rigid, but gender remains mediated through economic logic.
CSR, Environment, and Communication Ethics
In Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs in the British Press, you draw attention to the ideological dimensions of environmental discourse. To what extent is corporate sustainability communication ethical, and to what extent is it strategic?
Sustainability communication is rarely purely ethical or purely strategic. It exists within institutional pressures such as reputational management, regulatory compliance, and stakeholder expectations. The ethical question becomes one of alignment. When sustainability discourse reproduces growth imperatives without structural change, it remains strategic. When communication acknowledges limits, trade-offs, and systemic transformation, it approaches ethical practice. The ideological dimension lies in how environmental responsibility is framed, as moral obligation or competitive advantage.
The Future: Intersectional Crises and the Transformation of Communication
Your forthcoming work focuses on intersectional crises such as gender, climate, and migration. What major fault lines do you believe will shape communication research over the next decade?
Three major fault lines are emerging: Legitimacy under algorithmic governance (how authority is constructed in digital infrastructures). Intersectional precarity (how gender, race, migration status, and class intersect within communication labor).
Trust erosion and epistemic instability (the fragmentation of shared realities). Communication research should move beyond tactical analysis toward structural sociology of knowledge, capital flows, and institutional legitimacy.
Brent Huffman | Documentary & Television Director, Producer, Writer, and Cinematographer, Professor, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University
We are in pursuit of a lens that stretches from the world’s most high-risk crisis regions and dusty archaeological sites to the corridors of maximum-security prisons. Award-winning director and Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism Professor Brent Huffman is more than just a “documentarian”; he is an ethical advocate for the truth. From Mes Aynak, Afghanistan’s 5,000-year-old heritage on the brink of erasure, to the war-torn streets of Yemen, Huffman’s camera always seeks that rendered-invisible conscience. In this interview, we spoke with Huffman about the aesthetic boundaries of documentary cinema, the intimacy afforded by being a “one-man crew,” and how independent storytelling can survive in an era dominated by algorithms.
When we look at your films, we see a powerful emotional foundation where personal loss, social injustice, and a heavy sense of witnessing are intertwined. What is the fundamental motivation that pushes you out of your comfort zone and into the world’s most high-risk crisis regions? Is it more of an “intellectual rage,” or a reckoning of conscience?
The passion that drives me has always been social justice and human rights. As a child I grew up with an angry and abusive father, so my earliest memories are feelings of being trapped and oppressed. When I see someone’s rights being infringed upon or taken away, I feel immediate empathy because I relate to this feeling on this level. I feel a personal connection to these people who are oppressed, and I feel a personal obligation to do everything I can to help them.
In telling human rights and social justice stories, I am also drawn to stories that are difficult to tell. If someone tells me, “that story is impossible to tell” due to the region being dangerous and the threat level high for the subjects, I feel drawn to these stories. As a documentary filmmaker and journalist, we cannot be told “don’t tell this story because it is high risk or even impossible to tell”. In many ways, I feel these are the most important stories to tell and the individuals in the greatest need of my help. It is my personal duty to tell these stories to the world. There is a wonderful quote that my role model Academy Award winning filmmaker Julia Reichert used to always say, “Be ashamed to die unless you have won some victory for humanity,” by Horace Mann. I feel it is my role as a filmmaker to use the medium to help humanity.
In Saving Mes Aynak, the camera was not merely a passive observer recording events; it transformed into a tool for cultural activism. While documenting that 5,000-year-old heritage that archaeologists were trying to protect at the cost of their lives, when did you become convinced that cinema should be an active “protective shield” rather than just an archive?
I do try and separate my activism from my documentary films, though you are right, Saving Mes Aynak is a call to action to save Afghanistan’s threatened heritage and the human rights of the Afghan people. I also try to use my own voice separate from the film to advocate for these rights appearing on CNN, Al Jazeera, PBS, etc. to warn the world of this impending tragedy. So I try to separate the two. For example, I don’t appear in the film SMA and let the subjects of the documentary speak for themselves about what is happening. But outside of the film I donated money to their cause buying them computers and digital cameras, created online petitions, screenings and awareness campaigns, etc., to help save the ancient Buddhist city of Mes Aynak and to support the human rights of Afghans. But in the documentary SMA, it is Qadir, the Afghan archaeologist who is the central subject of the film, who is the real hero risking his life to save the threatened heritage of Afghanistan. I am using the film to amplify his voice.
Finding Yingying, which you produced, is a deeply sensitive narrative that avoids the often pain-exploiting traps of the “true crime” genre. In such traumatic stories, is stopping the recording at a family’s most vulnerable moment—or choosing not to use those scenes—a professional loss for a director, or an ethical imperative? Where do you draw that line?
Good question. These vulnerable moments, as long as the subjects are OK with them being filmed as they were in FY, are so important for audiences to see. In FY the family will never recover from the loss of their daughter. The family members are forever broken by her tragic murder. And I feel it is so important that audiences see and feel that love and loss, even when it is painful to view. I wanted audiences to feel empathy for Yingying’s family and to imagine how they would feel if this loss happened to them. And you are correct, we tried very hard to not fall into the dehumanizing and sensationalizing traps of the true crime genre.
We wanted FY to be a celebration of Yingying, her life, her passions, and the many people who loved her, not a story of her killer and tragic murder. FY also began as a class project in my documentary class. I am so proud of that project and its evolution from student film to award winning documentary seen around the world.
In war zones or hard-to-reach areas, you often take on the roles of director, cinematographer, and sound operator all by yourself—essentially acting as a “one-man crew.” How does this state of solitude break down the hierarchical “cold” distance between you and the people whose stories you tell? Do those small cameras offer you a kind of “invisibility” and a gateway to “intimacy”?
Yes, I also work in the cinema verite tradition where I try to become like a fly on the wall and capture life as if I am invisible. I want the subjects to tell their stories themselves and to do that you need to develop a deep trust and rapport with your subjects. And this trust takes time especially in the kinds of places I work in where I am seen initially as an outsider. I do also work with local producers and translators and I do interact with the subjects, so it is not so much solitude as it is a kind of deep immersion into the lives of others.
In your current project, Yemen Mosaic, you are shifting your focus to Yemeni women working to save their cultural heritage. While recording this massive legacy that war and time are trying to destroy, how has the resilience of these women transformed your cinematography and your worldview?
I am immensely inspired by my subjects, and I am deeply honored that they allow me to be a witness to their lives. Their passion to save heritage, even when it might risk their life, deeply inspires and moves me. Keep in mind also that these women are working in a patriarchal society that sometimes makes their work very difficult. The resilience of these women, their love of heritage, and their hope for the future is infectious and is a central theme I want audiences to feel when viewing the film.
At the Medill School, you produce projects by taking your students to “rendered invisible” spaces like prisons, such as in Documenting Carceral Injustice. How do you instill the concept of “ethical witnessing” in a new generation of documentarians, rather than a sterile concept like “objectivity”? What is the biggest misconception you see in their first encounters within a prison?
This is a great question. There is a terrible history of human rights abuses around prisons in the U.S. that I won’t get into here, but the point is that incarcerated people have had their rights and their story taken from them by the carceral system. My students need to be taught about this history and about how vulnerable and oppressed incarcerated people are.
In my documenting carceral injustice program, we collaborate with incarcerated people in the entire filmmaking process, in order to tell the incarcerated person’s story in their own words, again a story that the carceral system has taken from them.
Negative stereotypes also portray incarcerated people in a extremely negative light. So we strive in the class to also humanize incarcerated people and break these harmful stereotypes. The first misconception from students comes from these stereotypes often portrayed in Hollywood fiction films and TV shows – that portray incarcerated people are “dangerous and scary.” My students, after starting to work with incarcerated people, come to find that incarcerated people are some of the warmest, kindest, and most open individuals and this class collaboration becomes an incredible life changing experience for all involved.
Today, the merger processes of giants like Netflix and Warner Bros. point toward a massive monopoly in content production. As an academic and documentarian, I wonder: in this “content factory” system where profound stories are often sacrificed to algorithms, will there be a crack left for independent documentary filmmaking to breathe?
Yes, this is a terrible development for all media makers, not just documentary filmmakers. We have just come out of a real Golden Age of documentaries where doc films could be seen on all major streamers and in many venues online. This environment still exists, but there has been a restriction coming from these kinds of mergers and from some outlets like VICE News ending entirely and PBS losing nearly all its government funding, for example.
There still is room for doc filmmakers to breathe but the merger and political situation is currently very bad for all media in the United States. It may be some years before the situation improved. But documentaries are still being made and seem on major outlets, on streamers, and on TV and in theaters. There is still incredible work being made and seen by audiences.
We are in an era where hybrid workflows involving AI, Virtual Production (VP), and VFX are being discussed even in documentary cinema. In an age where technology is so dominant, where will be the “final sanctuary” for documentary film to protect those “unrecordable” and “unimitable” aspects of the human spirit?
AI is an enormous threat for documentary film and journalism, as it is for all forms of media. Everything can be faked now, and in the US, there is also a distrust of media especially media coming from journalists. So trust in media and a trust in journalists and documentary filmmakers is extremely important as is an education about AI is crucial starting at a young age. If there is a “final sanctuary” for documentary film it must exist in this trusted space by filmmakers with strong ethics who are not using AI, VP, or VFX.
How do you perceive the language of documentary filmmaking in Turkey? Are there names you follow or a “Turkish story” that makes you say, “I wish I had been the one to tell this”?
I’ve only visited Turkey a few times usually enroute to Afghanistan, but I think the country is an incredible fascinating place with a rich cultural heritage that rivals Egypt. I would love to tell the stories of these wonderful sites like the ancient site Neolithic GöbekliTepe that are much less known than the pyramids. I think there could be an incredible documentary about the work being done in Turkey by Turkish archaeologists to save and preserve these ancient sites.
Gobeklitepe is an archaeological site in Sanliurfa, Turkey – stock photo
Over the years, you have witnessed many things—from the dusty archaeological sites of Afghanistan to the war-weary streets of Yemen, and from the cold walls of American prisons to the heart of geopolitical crises. At the end of this journey, does Brent Huffman still look at the world through the eyes of a director, or is he now primarily a human rights advocate?
Another great question! As an artist, I also paint – I have to say I view the world through both lenses – as a human rights and social justice advocate but also as a creative director/artist. Ultimately, I achieve both things through my filmmaking – I feel you can tell documentary stories in a way that allows audiences to feel what the subjects in the films feel – see themselves in the stories on screen.
Audiences can feel deep empathy for subjects in documentaries that they do not know, that may live thousands of miles away in another part of the world. And by feeling this empathy, they can be motivated to help change a bad situation and help people whose lives are in danger. Audiences can help save ancient cites, as they did in Saving Mes Aynak, advocate for prison reform and for the release of wrongfully convicted people in my prison classes, and help support women risking their lives to save heritage in Yemen. And finally, to see Yingying, from Finding Yingying, as the incredible and brilliant young woman that she was instead of as a murder victim.
Interview Series: Surveillance Capitalism, Public Sphere, and Digital Regimes | Interviewer: Gokhan Colak
Influencer Culture, Creative Labor, Authenticity
Alice Marwick’s conceptualizations of micro-celebrity and self-branding examine howauthenticity is produced within influencer culture. In your research on influencers, creative labor, and particularly the representation of marginalized identities, at what points do you observe this discourse of “authenticity” becoming empowering, and at what points does it turn into an exploitative mechanism?
For marginalized creators, authenticity is a double-edged sword. In both my research and professional experience as a content creator, authenticity is a contentious strategy. You need to simultaneously prove authenticity while also accept that you’re going to be scrutinized by a platform’s algorithmic recommendation system and audiences alike. This becomes complicated when your identity becomes a brand.
How do you convey “realness”when working and speaking with audiences that may be conditioned to devalue or distrust you? And how do you “keep it real” while simultaneously working to build your platform? As a disabled content creator, I encountered this all the time: DMs asking me to “prove” my disability. I would often finding mutual creators on the subreddit pager/IllnessFakers, where 200,000 members hope to expose disabled and chronically ill creators for “faking it” because they were showing their disability too much.
In this case, authenticity became damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Sure, social media and content creation platforms are spaces where disabled and other marginalized creators can communicate and work, but it doesn’t mean that we still don’t encounter ableist ideas about who gets to do the work and whose work is valued. Authenticity is complicated, and for many creators, it’s more of an “idea” than a reality.
Digital Activism, Platforms, Sustainability
Zeynep Tufekci argues that while activism in the digital age has gained speed, it often lacksorganizational depth. In your analyses of micro-activism shaped through disability, bodypolitics, and everyday experiences on platforms such as TikTok, how do you evaluate the capacity of this form of visibility to generate long-term political transformation?
In the first big wave of social media and content creation platforms (late 2000s, 2010s), Internet spaces were hubs for marginalized communities to challenge mainstream narratives about political existence and current events. (Definitely not just something unique to disability communites!) Twitter, especially, was an important tool for various disability communities.
Hashtags served as indexing tools to link different conversations together. Movements like #CripTheVote, #PowerToLive, and #DisabilityTooWhite catalyzed important conversations about ableism, racism, and political power. It also brought other people into the conversation. The hashtags weren’t gatekept behind closed doors. While these hashtag movements weren’t always “big,” they also brought attention to every day experiences about disability and political change.
However, the enshittification of Twitter following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform in 2022 really dissolved disability communities and organizing on the platform. In this case, micro-activism becomes a verybprecarious circumstance and isn’t always possible when the platform removes protections for hate speech or is filled with spam bots. This doesn’t mean people aren’t organizing on other platforms, like Bluesky or TikTok, but the centralized hub of advocacy isn’t the same.
Affective Publics, Emotional Labor, Public Sphere
Zizi Papacharissi’s concept of affective publics suggests that the digital public sphere is constituted through emotions. In your work on TikTok narratives, personal storytelling, and the visibility of marginalized bodies, how do you define the boundary between the solidarity- producing potential of emotional publics and the instrumentalization of emotional labor?
For many disabled creators, the personal truly is political and embodied. Digitally mediated work like content creation, influencing, and livestreaming aren’t just about obtaining social, economic, and cultural capital for disabled creators who monetize their labor. There’s also an embodied, emotional feeling to this work. In my research and personal experience as a disabled creator who made disability-centric content, emotional appeals and advocacy become central to creative work. That boundary is often murky and messy. This can differentiate based on the type of creative labor you engage with, but the instrumentalization of emotional labor can contribute to some of the authenticity negotiation problems I spoke about in a previous response. Yes, disability advocacy and self-branding can help build awareness and support creators from an economic standpoint, but at what cost?
Public Relations, Ethics, Public Interest
Grunig’s normative theory of public relations proposes an ethical model of communicationbased on dialogue and reciprocity. From your perspective at the intersection of critical PR andactivism, particularly within a platform-based visibility economy, to what extent do youbelieve such symmetrical and ethical communication models are feasible in practice?
I’m thinking about these very questions in some new projects about what authenticity means in creator culture now that GenAI tools are pervasive in platform economies. For instance, in one forthcoming book chapter I’m working on, I examine the labor of human influencers who promote GenAI Technologies through false storylines and personae. This is becomign increasingly common on platforms that prioritize short-form content and e- commerce, such as TikTok and Instagram.
One such creator went viral in late 2025 for claiming her Ph.D. advisor stole her research. But when other creators looked into it, there were many inconsistencies between what she was telling audiences. What her content showed. The creator claimed she was a sociology phd student, but there was no concrete evidence that she was even enrolled as a university student, and all of her videos featured the same GenAI product. Like consumers in the early 2000s with print advertising, we’re currently experiencing an authenticity overload, where audiences are oversaturated with information, and it’s more diffuclt to tell if a creator’s “realness” is actually genuine. This has some dangerous implications for symmetical and ethical brand communication in the creator economy. Why should I invest in a product, idea, or belief if I can’t prove that it’s authentic? I believe we’re entering an authenticity collapse, where there is little distinction between fact and fiction. İt’s all about how platforms, brands, and creators can profit from spectacle, even if that spectacle isn’t rooted in reality.
Algorithms, Visibility, Inequality
José van Dijck’s “platform society” approach argues that digital platforms are not neutral tools but normative structures. Based on your research into algorithmic visibility, content moderation, and the experiences of marginalized communities, which aspects of platformdesign do you see as most actively reproducing social inequalities?
Platform companies also want to accrue the biggest possible profit. If they believe the presence of disabled people will turn brands and audiences alike away, and drive down their profits, they will not prioritize disability visibility. This is also the case for other marginalized groups across race, gender, class, and sexuality.
Platforms reflect dominant social values and beliefs about who we should see and who holds power. İf disabled people are devalued and pushed out of physical public and labor spaces, this will be reflected into the platform’s design and algorithmic recommendation systems—the latter which ultimately shapes visibility and participation in digital publics. It’s not that an algorithmic recommendation system is doing something new when it censors or decides to remove protections for disabled users. They’re drawing on previously existing ideas and beliefs that ultimately come from the contexts they’re designed and created in.
Academia, Activism, Public Knowledge
Considering your work that brings together influencer culture, digital activism, disability studies, and critical communication scholarship, what do you see as the most urgent responsibility of academia today: to document these practices, to critique them, or to develop directly transformative interventions?
I think this is ultimately an industry issue. Communication and media scholarship is truly behind other sibling fields (e.g., anthrolopology, sociology, English and cultural studies, gender studies) when it comes to disability centered research. İn the last five years, there has been one job in North American higher education that specifically called for expertise in disability and communication/media studies. I’m focused on that context because that’s where I live and work. I would imagine it’s a similar issue across other geopolitical contexts. We won’t be able to document, critique, or develop interventions if universities and industries aren’t investing in disability studies. And not just “studies of disabled media users or workers,” but disability critique as central to knowledge making and creative practices that can contribute to worlds where EVERYONE counts.
In your research on the representation of disability, body politics, and everyday experiences on digital platforms, how do you construct counter-narratives to the “inspirational stories” so often reproduced by mainstream media? Do you believe these counter-narratives are genuinely capable of producing transformation within the digital public sphere?
I think disabled creators’ engagement with platform affordances can absolutely challenge ableist narratives and tropes such as the “tragedy” of disability, supercrips, and inspiration porn. In my research on disabled TikTok creators pushing back against algorithmic suppression and heightened harassment, I found that creators used play and strategic engagement to both bring attention to social issues while also pushing back agains the idea that disabled people need to be saved or need pity from nondisabled audiences.
In North American culture (the geopoltical context I create, research, and write from) disabled people are historically pushed out of public life and are not seen as “equals” or even “human.” So platforms definitely offer an avenue to support communities, bring people together, and challenge these harmful, ableist mediations (though people may still face ableist harassment or suppression).
Digital Ethnography, Researcher Positionality
In the context of your research with influencers, TikTok communities, and marginalized groups, how should the ethical positioning of the researcher be rethought within digital ethnography and qualitative analysis? What limits and responsibilities have your own studies Revealed to you in this regard?
Nondisabled researchers often ask me, “Can I research disability and creators if I’m not disabled myself?” I think-at least in North American academia—there is this belief that you must be disabled yourself in order to write and research about disability. But lived experience does not automatically mean you are an academic expert in that subject. I’m not here to poliçe or control what other scholars are writing about. Moreover, I believe disabled scholars, who are underrepresented in academia, should not be left to do the labor of disability research. İ do think researchers need to bring an ethics of care to their work. There’s a difference between writing and researching and theorizing lived experiences. Disability isn’t a monolith, and i don’t claim that my theoretical and ethnographic work is the end-all-be-all of disability media studies. We need a multiplicity of voices, findings, and ideas. And we need to be responsible when we do that.
Interview Series: New Media, Digital Culture and Algorithm | Interviewer: Gokhan Colak
Marcelle Chagas Do Monte | Journalist, founder of Rede JP, and Researcher at the Mozilla Foundation’s Tech and Society Program
Journalistic Trajectory and Professional Positioning
How did your journey into journalism begin? What social or personal motivations were decisive in your choice of this profession?
My journey into journalism began at the intersection of social inequality and informational injustice. Growing up in Brazil, I witnessed how entire communities—Black, peripheral, Indigenous, and favela residents—were systematically misrepresented or simply rendered invisible by mainstream media. At the same time, there was a striking lack of journalists from these groups in the main spaces of news production. This absence was not neutral: it shaped public policies, influenced the allocation of resources, and defined who was considered worthy of attention, credibility, and protection.
Journalism became, for me, a tool to confront these structural silences and to build bridges between lived experience, scientific knowledge, and public debate.
How did your journey into journalism begin? What social or personal motivations were decisive in your choice of this profession?
My professional trajectory has been shaped by work in newsrooms, in science communication, and later in the fields of digital rights and technology policy. These experiences revealed how power operates through information flows and how narratives can both reproduce historical inequalities and challenge them.
Today, I position myself at the intersection of journalism, communication, and digital inclusion, with a focus on rights advocacy. I work on mapping local flows of information and disinformation, especially in vulnerable territories, using participatory methodologies. This path led me to join the Mozilla Foundation as a Fellow, where I investigate not only informational ecosystems in traditional territories but also community perceptions of artificial intelligence. I understand journalism not as a neutral observer, but as a democratic infrastructure with social responsibility, particularly in contexts marked by historical exclusion and algorithmic asymmetries.
Truth, Information Integrity, and Disinformation
How do you define the concept of “information integrity” in the context of journalism? What does this approach seek to achieve beyond traditional fact-checking practices?,
Information integrity concerns the health of the entire informational ecosystem: who produces knowledge, which voices are amplified or silenced, which interests structure the circulation of content, and how technologies shape visibility. There is no information integrity without diversity of voices, protection against manipulation, the مواجهة of hate speech, and accountability for the actors who organize this system.
In this sense, information integrity seeks to ensure transparency, plurality, contextualization, and informational justice throughout the entire information cycle—from production and dissemination to interpretation and social impacts. It is about creating the conditions for society to sustain a public sphere grounded in facts, plural, trustworthy, and free from systemic manipulation.
Based on your field experience, what kinds of impacts have you observed disinformation having on local communities? How do you assess the local manifestations of misinformation produced at a global scale?
In my fieldwork in favelas, quilombola territories, Indigenous communities, and urban peripheries, I have observed how disinformation deepens pre-existing vulnerabilities. False narratives about health, climate change, elections, and public security circulate locally, combining with historical distrust toward institutions. Content produced at a global scale—such as conspiracy theories, scientific denialism, or anti-vaccine campaigns—is reconfigured according to local cultural, linguistic, and affective codes. This process gives rise to what I call “territorialized regimes of disinformation,” in which global narratives are reprogrammed to operate locally, producing deep and long-lasting social effects.
Digitalization, Platforms, and Algorithmic Power
We observe that digital platforms have significantly transformed journalistic practice. Do you consider this transformation primarily a democratizing opportunity, or has it created new forms of dependency and control?
Digital platforms have unprecedentedly expanded possibilities for publication and participation. However, this democratization is structurally ambiguous. While historically marginalized groups have gained new means of expression, they now operate under opaque regimes of algorithmic governance, extractive data economies, and engagement architectures that privilege polarization.
Field research in Indigenous and quilombola territories shows that digital trust still relies primarily on relationships of proximity and affectivity, in contrast to the low levels of trust in formal institutions. Platforms have ceased to be mere technical intermediaries and have become central political actors in defining what is visible, legitimate, and relevant in the public sphere, guided by market logics rather than democratic principles.
What consequences does the algorithmic determination of news visibility have for the structure of the public sphere and the culture of democratic debate?
As the coordinator of a journalistic organization, the Black Journalists Network for Diversity in Communication, I observe that the growing dependence of journalism on these infrastructures also strains the editorial autonomy of news outlets and collectives. The result is not only the proliferation of disinformation, but a structural erosion of the foundations that sustain public dialogue.
Inequalities, Representation, and Media Diversity
How do racial, class-based, and geographical inequalities within the media landscape shape news production processes and forms of representation?
Racial, class, and territorial inequalities are not external to journalism: they are embedded in newsroom composition, agenda-setting, source selection, and narrative framing. When decision-making spaces remain socially homogeneous, entire realities are interpreted through perspectives that fail to recognize their complexity and legitimacy.
In Brazil, research we have conducted—most recently in partnership with Thomson Media on the sustainability of independent journalism—has shown that outlets led by underrepresented populations receive the least funding and face the greatest barriers to inclusion in institutional circuits of knowledge production. Partnerships with the State University of Rio de Janeiro have also highlighted the low presence of Black professionals and women in the country’s major newsrooms.
Do you view diversity and representation in the media more as an ethical responsibility, or as a structural necessity for journalism to sustain its public function?
Thus, diversity is not merely an ethical issue but a structural condition for journalism to fulfill its public function. Without epistemic diversity, it is impossible to fully understand social reality, identify emerging risks, or build trust with populations that are simultaneously the most affected by disinformation and the least represented in media systems. Representation entails redistributing not only visibility, but also authority in the production of meaning.
Ethics, Pressures, and Future Perspectives
In the context of censorship, self-censorship, and economic pressures, what do you see as the most fundamental structural challenge journalists face today?
The most profound structural challenge facing journalism today is the convergence of economic precarity, platform dependency, and political polarization. Professionals operate under financial instability, legal harassment, digital surveillance, and coordinated disinformation campaigns, which foster both explicit censorship and self-censorship. These conditions weaken investigative journalism, long-term reporting, and the capacity to hold power accountable.
In the context of advancing artificial intelligence, automation, and data-driven journalism, the future of the profession will depend on political and ethical choices. These technologies can strengthen investigation, expand multilingual access to information, and support complex analysis, but they can also intensify power concentration, narrative standardization, and large-scale manipulation.
In light of developments such as artificial intelligence, automation, and data-driven journalism, what kind of future do you foresee for journalism over the next decade?
In the coming decades, the role of journalism as a public good will be increasingly contested. I see as central the strengthening of community-rooted media, philanthropic models for the sustainability of the profession, open infrastructures, and AI approaches grounded in human rights and social justice. The future of journalism will depend on its ability to rebuild trust, pluralism, and information integrity as pillars of democratic life.
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